


Kasumi Invictus

by Juan_Milagro



Category: Ranma 1/2 AU - Fandom
Genre: Blatant Criminal Behavior, F/F, F/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-25
Updated: 2019-10-21
Packaged: 2020-05-19 06:19:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 43,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19351225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Juan_Milagro/pseuds/Juan_Milagro
Summary: This is the first AU fic that I have ever undertaken. All my other pieces have been set after Volume 38 of the tankoban. This story begins several decades before the Ranma 1 / 2 story as written by Takahashi. It begins with Soun right before the start of World War II. It is very rough on the adults in the Ranma story, but there is yet another twist, Kasumi is not a Christian. She is, therefore, much more than the wallflower/foil that Takahashi designed her to be. Soun and his wife, Akiko in this story, brought their daughters up to believe in the old Shinbutsu-shuugou, which is still the traditional religion of Japan today. This seemingly small difference has an enormous impact on the story of Ranma et al. Also, I must give credit to Susan Doenime, who wrote the laugh-until-you-cannot-breath piece entitled, Pastpresent. This one's for you, Susan.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Susan Doeneme](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Susan+Doeneme).



Nakahara Soun was born on an inauspicious day -- August 15, 1936. No one considered August the fifteenth be an inauspicious day at the time. That label would would be applied to it on Soun's ninth birthday in 1945.

Soun's father had been born into a family of _goushi_ or country samurai. He married into another family of the same social class. Given that Soun's father was the third son of a minor samurai, everyone thought it was lucky that Japan had just recently conquered Korea. Soun's mother and father became newlywed colonists in Korea. A very auspicious beginning -- _for them_.

The new branch of the Nakahara family quickly became prosperous Japanese colonists in Northern Korea. Soun was born and the three of them enjoyed luxurious living on a vast plantation in Korea just a few kilometers north of the thirty-eighth parallel. They raised vegetables for export back to Japan. Some of their produce was sold to other colonists who worked in Japanese owned and operated factories. The Nakahara quickly took to the life of upper class samurai, lording over the local Korean peasants and other Japanese colonists in the lower social classes.

Soun was unaware of just how arrogant he and his parents had become until the sixteenth of August in 1945. That was the day they heard the voice of their beloved Emperor, the Tenno, for the first time ever. The same speech had been heard in Japan on the fifteenth, Soun's birthday, but it was not heard in Korea until the day after.

In typical Japanese fashion, Tenno had not said the word surrender, but His speech had boiled down to the same thing. All of the Japanese got the gist of His message. This general understanding was a phenomenon that the Japanese refer to as _haragei._ In western society, _haragei_ would be most accurately described as _“taking_ _a_ _hint”_ , or understanding without being explicitly told; getting one's point across without full explication.

At age nine, Soun was keenly disappointed in the Tenno's orders. He had been hoping to die on the point of an American bayonet. No one had seen fit to give him a rifle, but he had been practicing with the naginata for months in preparation for the American invasion of Korea, just as his father had been spending the last days of the war drilling with one of the hastily organizedJapanese militia units in Korea.

While at home, his father assaulted Soun repeatedly with his practice bayonet, allowing Soun the opportunity to get in as much realistic practice as he could with his naginata technique. Soun practiced his technique until he could “kill” his father in nearly every contest. His father refused to bath after every contest he lost to his son. He proudly wore the chalk stripes that Soun had given him back to his militia unit, bragging that his son had marked him during their practic together. It did a great deal to help over all morale.

For his part, Soun had repeatedly taken a dark joy in lurid fantasies wherein he beheaded or disemboweled ten Americans or more before being shot by one of them standing outside the reach of his exceedingly sharp naginata. He knew that such a scenario was unlikely in the extreme, but he planned on dying for his Emperor as best he could and, being escorted as many of the enemy as he could collect into the great-unknowable when he died.

It was never officially admitted, but every Japanese colonist understood that the war had been going badly for Japan for months; the docks at Pusan were stacked high with goods waiting for cargo ships; the immediate future looked dire. Even if the Americans did not come, the Japanese colonists had the surly locals to fight, and none of the colonists looked forward to that. Better to die at the hands of the Americans, worthy enemies, rather than than the cowardly surrender-monkey Koreans who were rotten with treachery.

Alas, it was not to be. They had no choice. Soun, after the sixteenth of August, 1945 was now staring grimly at the prospect of bowing to the first American soldier he met, rather than cutting him in twain. His heart felt like as though it were made of glass, had shattered, leaving sharp shards working their way out of his chest.The surrender was an awful shock to the psyches of all Japanese, but it was especially rough on gungho boys Soun's age.

The trip from dominate conqueror to submissive peasant was not at all easy -- or even simple. He had been a young noble, then suddenly, without any way of anticipating it, he was a nobody among a mob of other faceless nobodies on their way to the Home Islands. It was such a horrific loss of face that he was only barely able to cope; the young Nakahara Soun considered suicide many, many times. Soun felt as though he had received a fatal wound that day and that it would never heal. His body remained alive in abject suffering, but his soul seem to have passed into the great-unknowable. He started vomiting very often without good reason.

The Americans transported some six million Japanese home at gunpoint in a few short months after August 15, 1945. The fact that many of the Japanese had been born in the colonies and had never seen the country of their origin made no difference to the Americans, or the western oni, as Soun came to think of them, every person of Japanese extraction was to be rounded up and put on a transport ship.

During the war, the United States Navy had systematically destroyed the entire Japanese merchant fleet. Japanese colonists and soldiers were returning to a land that was desperately short on foodstuffs, clothing, medicine, potable water and fuel. However, knowing that things at home were bad, and actually experiencing those conditions, were two very different things.

The US Army loaded the Nakahara into one of the roomy ships that they had used to land their own troops in Korea. The ride back to Japan was comfortable, if a bit too crowded, and they were well fed, but all that sort of thing stopped once they were ashore.

Japanese has a special verb that means “to handle cargo,” it's “ _hikiageru_ .” The Nakahara were in the second or third wave of repatriated Japanese, it was hard for Soun's father to know from all the confusion of the times, but to their consternation they found that they were _“h_ _i_ _kiagesha,”_ or “returned cargo” and not ordinary Japanese. They were now considered a special class of people and were being blamed for Japan losing the war.

The Americans treated them politely, but remained cold toward them. The western oni went out of their way to let the Japanese colonists that they had been be a problem for the Japanese government to solve. Colonists received nothing in the way of special treatment. They were deliberately overlooked in favor of other Japanese people who had remained on the main islands for the duration. The Nakahara were reduced to the status of mud wading rice planters. And not as farm owners, mind you, they became farm _workers_ . They were paid to help someone else raise _their_ rice on lands that the proud new owners of which, had just been given by the Western Oni.

Soun's father died of cirrhosis of the liver within a year of their return to Japan. He had been a heavy drinker while living in Korea, mostly to appease his nagging conscience,and then wasted what little silver he had hoarded,buying shouchuu upon their landing in the deep Japanese mud. Soun's mother expired within a year after his father's demise. Soun believed she died of grief over her loss of face combined with the passing of his father. This had an extremely deleterious affect on Soun's moral compass.

Soun, along with the overwhelming majority of Japanese youths of his time, a devotee of _Shinbutsu-shuugou_. This ancient religion wove the Shinto Pantheon together with the Buddhist Pantheon in an exceedingly complex way. They practiced Zen Buddhist meditation every day and even had a Shinto shrine on the campus wherein he and his fellow students worshiped daily. The Imperial government had insisted that _Shinbutsu-shuugou_ be taught in schools and had been unreasonably adamant about it.

Japanese students were not taught Shinto as a religion in schools. They were taught Shinto as the history of Japan. To them, the _Kojiki_ , _Tales of Ancient Matters_ , and the _Nihongi_ , _Chronicles of Japan_ , were not just collections of ancient stories and legends, but were taught as being factual. To the Japanese students of Soun's era, these were taught and believed in as much as your high school history texts are today, which should tell anyone with good sense that government run education is a huge mistake, but the badly misled Japanese of Soun's generation lacked a single clue, just as the vast majority of Americans are misled by their public school system run by the government.

Shinto maintains that there is at least a wee bit of divinity in everything. The reason that anything exists, is that it has a kind of life. The more beautiful and awe inspiring something might be, a large tree, a magnificent landscape, or even just a puny little waterfall with its waters babbling around an eye catching arrangement of rocks, warrants special recognition. If a particular location is beautiful enough, Japanese established a Shinto shrine there.

Shinto teaches that there are very odd and wonderful creatures, such as _tengu_ , _yo_ _u_ _kai_ , _quilin_ and phoenixes. It teaches that the fox is a very special animal, that can, if it chooses, take on human form. The same is taught about the _tanuki_ or raccoon dog. Oh, and if one strives hard enough, one might well become a dragon. Dragons are considered to be very real and all of them are revered as sacred.

Shinto says that there is a very thin veil between the living and the dead and that dead humans are not actually dead -- just on the other side of this mysterious and invisible veil. They don't actually walk among the Kami, but that is merely a matter of class distinction. The Kami, god-like spiritual beings, will, on occasion, manifest themselves among humans, both living humans and the spirits of dead humans.

Shinto legends make it clear that the Kami are nothing like the western vision of Jehovah or Allah. Jehovah and Allah are deemed by their followers as being both omniscient and omnipotent -- which is quite illogical if one takes the time to think about it. For the Shintoist, the Kami are not all-knowing. Neither are the Kami indestructible. They are very powerful, but not all powerful. In Shinto, no matter how great any divine Entity might be, there is always another Divine Entity that is more powerful.

The single most powerful Kami made manifest in the human plane is Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess. She is believed to be the most powerful because it is She who makes all life on Earth possible. Amaterasu, the youngsters of Japan were taught, is also the actual Creator of all Japanese people. It is She who looks after them and takes care of their interests -- for the most part. There are always other Kami and Oni lurking about to complicate one's life, but in the main, it is Amaterasu who is the most important Kami for a person's existence.

Shinto also teaches that the Emperor, or Tenno, is a direct descendant of Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess. Tenno is still worshiped as a Kami in Japan, the second most important Kami out of some 8 billion Kami living in Japan. More importantly, Tenno is a Kami incarnate. He and His entire Family are sacred Kami and are not be trifled with. To do so would be an act of treasonous sacrilege.

Proof of anything, after all, is in the pudding. The Japanese based their decisions on the factual history of their home islands.The first was an invading Mongol army under the command of a Korean general in October of 1274. That invasion failed. The Japanese managed to repel the invaders despite their inability to move large numbers of troops effectively. The Japanese even waded out past the surf, attacking the Mongols and Koreans during the darkness after they had retreated to their ships. In the close quarters inside the ships, the Japanese weapons were slightly superior to those of the invaders. The Mongols mainly relied on horse riding archers and their powerful bows.

When the Mongol fleet tried to return to Korea, a great storm decimated their fleet of transport ships. The Japanese realized that this newly arisen struggle was not over. They hastily constructed a great wall along the beaches of _Hakata_ bay called the _Sekirui_ , or Stone Fort even as they reorganized their armies.

The Mongol/Korean invaders returned in the spring of 1281. The Japanese inflicted yet another massacre on the returning invaders, only there were fewer casualties among the Japanese that time. While the invading army was once again licking its wounds aboard its ships, they had tried moving down the coast to another harbor called Imari Bay, but that availed them nothing because a typhoon wracked southern end of the island of Honshu for two days.

The invading fleet was obliterated with a few struggling, half-flooded ships limping back to Korea; the invading forces were discouraged and left the shores of Japan with only a few surviving troops. The invaders who made it ashore at Imari Bay were slaughtered by the gleeful Japanese.

Kublai Khan had sent his best, but they were defeated. Mind you, Japanese leadership of the time were on pins and needles. They were very, very afraid that they were going to lose their sacred land to the invaders. They felt that they had been saved by the weather. They labeled it, “Kamikaze,” or “God Wind” which is most often translated as “Divine Wind.” They sincerely believed that they owed their victory to their eight million resident Kami, but to Amaterasu in particular.

Then, a little over three centuries later, in October of 1600, Ieyasu Tokugawa won a resounding victory over all the other power hungry daimyo of Japan at the little crossroads town called Sekigahara. This resounding victory allowed him to establish the new government called the Tokugawa Shogunate. The newly ascendant Tokugawa proceeded to throw all of the foreigners in Japan out, or to simply kill them. Only the Dutch were allowed to remain on a tiny island as well as two other  Dutchmen who had become the Shogun's retainers and were already settled in fiefdoms of their own.

Tokugawa did everything he could to eliminate all foreign influences in Japan. He outlawed firearms, persecuted Christian converts to the point of near extinction, and forbade all contact with any foreigners of any kind without his personal approval. Then he handed out very rigid edicts concerning nearly everything about Japanese society as a complete whole. He established rules for everything almost down to the slightest quirk and twitch.

Tokugawa's policies maintained the peace well enough, but the peace came at the price of social and economic stagnation. The circumstances that the samurai class lived in underwent a slow steady degradation both in economic and military terms. The the artisans and merchant class waxed fat by supplying the samurai class with their extensive needs, particularly loans. But the real danger to the nation as a whole was that innovation quietly died. No one did anything new. Little to nothing was invented. The arts changed -- slowly -- but metal working, industry and medicine all remained as they were for the next 254 years after Tokugawa established his rigid shogunate.

This stagnation came to an abrupt end just as internal conditions were becoming extremely difficult. The problem came from western medicine. Just enough of it had been adopted to improve both life-spans and infant survival rates. This caused a slow increase in population in both the upper and lower classes. After 254 years of Tokugawa rule, there were so many samurai around that it was becoming impossible to employ them in any way that they themselves could consider respectable. Many of the samurai became sword wearing bureaucrats who strutted about doing little but bullying the peasant and other lower classes.

This was much less of a problem among the farmers and artisans, but it was a severe problem with the merchant class. Merchants were traditionally considered the lowest of the low in Japanese society, but thanks to the demands of Tokugawa rule, the samurai were required to spend nearly all of their officially mandated stipends on clothing, weaponry and other accoutrements of their insufferably snooty and inherited class.

Additionally, they were required to travel in style between their homes and Edo once a year. They had to maintain two separate but equal households, one in their home fief and one in Edo. Tokugawa established these rules to keep them broke and it worked. The unintended consequence of this policy was that it drove most of the samurai class into debt and even penury. Nearly all of them owed one merchant or another vast sums of money. After 200 years, Japanese society was like thick snow on steep mountainside, the slightest jar would set off an avalanche.

Such a disturbance came with the arrival of an American squadron of ships under Commodore Matthew Perry. Him, his side-wheel steamships and their cannon were more than enough to set off a general tumble among the Japanese. Not only was the shogunate shocked, it was paralyzed. It simply hunkered down and quivered in the face of Perry's demands for the special treatment of Americans, especially their whalers who frequently washed up on Japanese beaches and had been routinely beheaded upon discovery. During those days, oil from whales was much like petroleum of today -- well worth fighting for in addition to the risks whalers endured to acquire it.

This was too much for the western clans who had never been on the best of terms with the Shogun and his minions. Power was returned to the Tenno or, His Heavenly Majesty. After that, Japan enjoyed a long series of wins. They won their umpteenth war with China in 1895, the so-called “first” Sino-Japanese War; in 1900 they marched along with other western armies to put down the Boxer Rebellion and relieved the siege of Peking in 1900; they defeated Russia, a large western power in 1905 and thereby acquired the whole of Korea; in 1918-1920 they fielded some 70,000 troops compared to the mere 7,000 troops from the United States in an effort to support the White Russian army against the Bolsheviks. This very nearly broke the finances of the Japanese government, and a smoldering resentment began to build in Japan against the West, particularly the United States.

They decided that they needed to be the United States of Asia. They suddenly adopted their own version of the Monroe Doctrine and then tried to make their new doctrine stick by the use of their newly acquired western styled arms.

There was a problem with this idea though, not all of Asia shared it with the Japanese. They had to be conquered first. Simple threats would not do for them the way that threats had worked for the United States in the Western Hemisphere. They found themselves invading and occupying foreign nations in Asia. It was bloody and difficult, but it beat having the western oni in charge of Asia. Better themselves than the horrible looking, foul smelling and round eyed Westerners of whatever the flavor of the year might be.

FDR, being a conniving bastard, bated the Japanese at every opportunity. He sent the Flying Tigers to support the Chinese against the Japanese. He denied the Japanese the steel scrap that they so desperately needed to support their efforts to establish their own empire. He was too self-impressed and too self-righteous to admit that the United States itself had become an empire and had its tentacles sucking the life out of China and other nations in Asia.

Churchill was all but begging FDR to get into the British war against Germany, so FDR ordered the US Pacific Fleet to base itself at Pearl Harbor,  Hawaii, rather than San Diego, California. The US Pacific Fleet changed its base over the objections of Admiral J. O. Richardson, who was fired by FDR and was relieved by the hapless and soon to be obliterated Admiral H. E. Kimmel.

This move of the American Pacific Fleet was clearly an existential threat to Japan. The US Pacific Fleet posed a dire threat to Japanese shipping and even the Home Islands of Japan. It had enough large battleships to make the Japanese fleet look like a box of child's play-pretties. Something had to be done and diplomacy was coming up short, mostly because both sides believed that they were superior to the other.

The United States believed in itself as much as the Japan believed in itself. More importantly, both nations had an equal amount of faith in their dominant religious systems. The vast majority of Americans believed in Jehovah and his son, Jesus, just as the Japanese held a sincere belief in the vast pantheon of Kami in the Shinbutsu-shuugou, a syncretic form of Shinto and Buddhism. The Americans sincerely believed that they had a sacred mission from God to “democratize” the entire world. The Japanese had the opinion that they had a mandate from heaven to rule all of Asia and possibly the world. Diplomacy stalled out and became a source of irritation to the leadership of both sides.

Surprise had long been a tool in Japan's strategic and tactical kit, and Admiral Richardson had been well aware of it. He had explained in very painful detail what would happen if FDR insisted on relocating the Pacific fleet from the California shore to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The Japanese had used surprise attacks against one another in their numerous internal conflicts. They surprised the Russians at Port Arthur and defeated them. They surprised the Russian fleet in the Battle of Tsushima Strait and defeated them again quite handily. So, the Japanese attack on the American naval station at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, should not have been a surprise at all. The truth be told, it was not a surprise. It had been anticipated by the Americans, but American politicians sold it as a complete and utterly unexpected surprise. The actual truth was that it the Japanese were the ones who were shocked and surprised. They managed to sink most of the American battleships -- at the expense of raising the ire of every single citizen of the United States. The Dear Leaders of the United States, FDR and his political party in particular, had no trouble persuading a previously reluctant populace that the time to fight had arrived on December 7, 1941.

Japanese leadership was thinking that we have over 8 million Gods on our side. Our troops and sailors will be reborn again in 49 days or less. The Americans do not want to fight. They will not fight if we hit them hard enough. We can hit them hard enough and we will _not_ lose. The Americans are more numerous than us. They are bigger than us. Their factories produce more than ours, but we have faced these kinds of odds before. We defeated the Mongols. We will defeat the Americans.

The Japanese failed to anticipate the reaction of the average and badly misled American citizen. To a man, they were infuriated and wanted to do bad things to any Japanese person they found. Some of them did. The FDR ordered the internment of all Japanese-American citizens in hastily constructed and very Spartan concentration camps. Along with other groups of American citizens that he mistrusted, the Amish, and that he did not like, members of the Jehovah's Witnesses Church. Nearly all of the American NAZIs were rounded up and placed in internment camps, along with all the other anti-war leaders who could be found.

The Japanese had deep faith in their Gods. They also had a great deal of self-confidence. They had trained themselves hard and well but the could not overcome two things about the United States: the fury they had lit and American industrial might. A year after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States was producing more weaponry than Italy, Japan, Russia and the United Kingdom combined -- and they did this with their women and old men. All of the able bodied men of military age went to the battlefields either as a volunteer, or as a willing but deeply frightened draftee.

That Japan lost this ridiculous war, should not be a surprise to anyone, but to the hyper-religious Japanese, it came as a very cold shock -- especially given that their government hid most of the facts from them until surrender became an absolute necessity.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki both became hideous tragedies and political footballs for decades to come, but the disaster created by the incendiary bombing of Tokyo was even worse and is almost never mentioned inside political circles. The three of these great tragedies was enough to force the Tenno to step in and order an immediate halt to the fighting. His direct order to his subjects was to stop fighting and stand down, not to surrender. This order created a very surreal condition for His subjects.

For the Nakahara family, this proved to be an exceedingly difficult burden to bear, but bear it they did to the best of their abilities. It killed Soun's mother and father, but left him alive to suffer through it. He arrived “home” a stranger in a strange land, but even worse, his homeland was now being run by alien creatures, all of whom looked less than human than any other people he had seen. He had never seen a round-eye before the surrender. He had been taught that all gaijin were inferior to Japanese, especially the Westerners. He could barely believe that Westerners were from planet Earth.

The non-smoking Westerner, a rare animal in those days, those who did not smoke stank almost as badly as the ones who did smoke. Their round eyes and odd eye colors offended Soun on principle. How dare anyone have round blue eyes? Or worse, round green eyes! To Soun, the only proper eye color was a shade of brown. Oh, and let's not talk about the red heads among the Westerners, they were the absolute worst to look at, with their carrot colored hair and their freckled skin. All of them looked like some very sick type of oni.

That is what Soun came to believe about all westerners. They were some kind of strange hostile oni whose only way to punish a person was to hand out unpleasant assignments to their victims. In the the case of the Nakahara clan it was the assignment to plant rice. They absolutely hated planting rice -- with a purple passion. It was degrading on top of being physically demanding.

In order to plant rice, one had to stand in cold knee deep mud all day and stuff the little sprouts into neatly made holes of just the right diameter and just the right depth with just the right amount of empty space around each one. The hot sunlight pounded down on your body and you had to keep the exact same rhythm as the other planters did, or you'd be shouted at by the village head. Then the flies and mosquitoes would steadily torment you all the day long.

Soun often debated with himself about which part of the day was worse, the mornings, the midday or the gray era that happened just as the sun fully set. The mosquitoes and flies would start gnawing at your exposed skin while the sky was still gray in the early morning; the sun would torment your body by trying to melt it, even as you stood in the chilly mud, and the mosquitoes became so thick in the gray skies of the evenings until it became nearly impossible to breath without sucking them down by the mouthful. The worst was blinking and then discovering that you had trapped one of the cursed things with your eyelids. Having a living mosquito thrashing around under your eyelids hurt worse than fire.

Soun sincerely believed the pronounced doctrines of Shinbutsu-shuugou, and assumed that mosquitoes had been something else in another life and had been reborn as mosquitoes forty-nine days after their deaths. Many of them had been soldiers at one time, here to pay back the Japanese. But, he did not care and killed as many of them as he could. He especially detested the flies, swatting them every time one of them remained still long enough.

Even worse was sitting around in the early evenings, watching his father drink himself into a drunken stupor while his mother staggered about cooking their meager rations. It got her out of the fields early, but that was of no help to her. All they had to eat was brown rice, sometimes they got treated to white rice, but either way, rice was all they had to supply them with the energy they needed to work. Their protein and fat came in the form of a very bland mayonnaise only rarely seasoned with garlic or something, and for the lack of other vegetables, they took vitamin pills given to them by the western oni.

His father's drinking ate up so much of the silver that they had carefully hoarded and smuggled back to Japan that it was unconscionable, but neither Soun nor his mother complained. Soun's father had been a heavy drinker while they lived in Korea. He drove his Korean sharecroppers hard -- especially when they were planting rice. Soun had not realized that his father drank hard to avoid his personal guilt. He never drank sake or beer, he favoured the hard stuff, a shochu of some kind. He could get drunk faster on distilled spirits than he could on the undistilled forms of alcohol.

And they never, but never had any company. Soun's father drank alone while his family ate alone. No one stopped by to check on them to see how they fared. The Nakahara, you see, were hikiagesha from Korea. The locals did not think of the Nakahara as being of the same blood. They were, in essence, foreigners whose appearance was Japanese, but were not real Japanese. They were treated with as though they were among the _youkai_.

Soun's mother got cut rather badly by a bomb fragment while planting rice. Their fellow planters all refused to give her blood. Why? Because she was a hikiagemono, literally an “unloaded cargo person” and needed blood from a member of the hikiagesha.

His mother suffered while he and his father rushed about begging other repatriated Japanese to donate blood. Finding someone with the right blood type had not been so much of a struggle. By this time, everyone knew what their blood type was. The trouble they had was finding a fellow hekiagesha who had a compatible blood type. His mother very nearly died of exsanguination before they found enough donors. This was a hard lesson that made Soun feel as though he might be as alien as the western oni who had ruined his fallen nation. He did not sleep at all that night, despite his exhaustion and hunger.

He took to training with a makeshift naginata every evening after that while his father drank cup after cup of shouchuu, and his mother cooked. The other people did not like his doing this, it was entirely too warlike in their eyes, but Soun did not give a shit. They could all go plant rice in their asses as far as he was concerned.

The village headmen, the Nakahara were among the numerous migrant rice planters, always came around to rail at Soun's daddy about Soun's ill behavior, but the old man was always in a drunken stupor and when he was not, he always gave them as much hell as they gave him.

“Practicing like that will make the Americans mad!” The local headman would shout at Soun's father.

“Fuck those Western Oni!” Soun's daddy would answer whenever he was sober enough to respond. “Someone must keep up the warrior traditions of Japan. D'you think that the Americans will be here forever? You're soft in the head and spirit if you do.”

These kinds of altercations isolated the Nakahara clan even further, but none of them cared. Soun's father was always too drunk to care about anything, and his mother suffered it in silence, as though she were an ambulatory mannequin. Both of them declined rapidly. His father was ravaged by liver disease and his mother had the appearance of a seventy year old rice planter at age forty. Her spirit broke shortly after her husband died.

Soun kept their funeral tablets despite not having a family shrine to store them in. He worshiped their spirits daily for the remainder of his long life, even after the Tendo adopted him as a son upon his marriage to Tendo Akiko. Soun was a very strong devotee to Shinbutsu-shuugou. He did not waver from that system of belief for his entire life.

After his parents were gone, Soun began to have -- episodes. Every time he had an episode, he had a hard time remembering what he had done, all he could tell was that he would come back to himself when he realized that someone, usually the headman, was shouting at him.

“Nakahara-kun! Nakahara-kun! Stop that. You look as though you might bite someone any second.”

Soun would then shake his head and watch the face of the person shouting at him and see them flinch away.

“You look like you're about to attack someone. That's too violent. You might attract the attention of the Americans. You haven't the right to make trouble for all of us.”

Soun would then respond with, “I'm sorry. I did not realize that I was doing such a thing.

Then he would go back to work slogging around in the rice paddy. It was awful work and he hated with a passion, but he was basically on his own and had no other way to earn any money. Oh, to be sure, he was a highly accomplished naginataka, but there was no real demand for such skill anymore. The Nihonjin had been ordered to submit to the western oni and that is what all the Nihonjin did, including the lowly _hikiagesha_ like him.

The western oni were the new samurai class, and the peasants treated them with the same caution that they had always treated official figures. It was a mix of abject cowardice and the herd instinct -- human characteristics that the Dear Leaders of every nation routinely take advantage of. The majority of the peasants wanted Soun suppressed, and that is what they did, despite his obvious resentment.

He kept having these odd emotional fits and he was severely admonished each every time he had one in public. The misery of planting rice and constantly being on the move went on until he turned fifteen on August 15, 1950. He had a fit that day that was nothing like the ones he had suffered through in the past. On that day, his behavior was much worse than had been in any of his previous fits.

The August sun was beating down on the planters without a trace of mercy. The biting flies and mosquitoes only barely let up during the mid-day sun. Soun had long ago learned that he had to balance his clothing. It had to be thick enough to ward off the biting insects and other vermin, but it also had to let his body reject heat. Rejecting heat meant that he had to sweat enough to soak his clothing and that meant that he suffered from constant thirst.

Someone shouted at him for not planting in rhythm with his fellow planters and that angered him.

“What difference does it make?” Soun shouted. “I'm plugging the seedlings properly! They'll grow just well as any you plant!”

“You are making things difficult for the rest of us, _Hikiagesha_ _mono_! You think you are special because you helped occupy Korea!”

This triggered something vile and aggressive deep in the Nakahara boy's heart. His face seemed to grow hot as his head seemed to swell and he thought he felt long sharp teeth filling his mouth.

While this happened, the other planters eyes grew wide with terror.

When the fit took Soun over completely, he felt his head start to drift away from his body and his tongue grew long and started flicking in and out of his mouth, much like a snake would use its tongue. He could literally taste the air with it. The air above the paddy was rich with the taste of green vegetation, mud, bugs and sweaty fear emanating from the rest of the work party.

They stared at him with their mouths wide open in abject horror for a moment, but when Soun started trying to speak, they broke and ran. It was such a funny sight that Soun's mood changed and his body returned to normal.

As his vision cleared after he recovered, he realized that he was the only on left in the paddy. He shook his head and kept right on planting the seedlings. He had to because the seedlings would die if they were not planted in a few hours. He was still their plugging seedlings in the soft smelly mud when the sun came up and his fellow planters arrived at dawn.

The headman's jaw dropped when he saw Soun in the paddy up to his knees in soft mud. The boy had very nearly finished the paddy. The headman's heart went out to _hikiagemono_. He was, after all still a very young man with little or no prospects, and he had stuck to his assigned task for an entire night on his own. In a fit of guilt, the headman clapped Soun on his right shoulder.

“I'm sorry, Nakahara-san. We sometimes forget what you are going through. Go home; get something to eat, sleep and return here in the morning.”

Soun was so exhausted that he could only respond by nodding his head. He trudged to the rickety shack he was living in, ate a large bowl of rice and bathed, but he could not sleep. He had so many mosquito bites that he itched all over and could not go to sleep. He scratched himself raw before exhaustion closed his eyes. He woke up late -- almost noon. By the time he got to the paddies, the headman was standing by a new rickshaw that was shiny with fresh paint. Soun stared, then looked around.  
“Where's the bigwig?” Soun asked.

“There won't be one until you find one to ride in this rickshaw,” the headman told him.

Soun weakened at his knees as waves of guilt washed through him.

“That thing's for me?”

The headman's grin grew even wider. “Yes, its yours. Don't worry, we paid for it. I got a good deal from its maker. He made it for another man who died before he could use it and his wife is not strong enough to pull it. We made a very sweet bargain for it.”

Soun suddenly remembered the manners his mother taught. He stood up straight, then bowed and said, “ _Arigatou-gozaimasu._ ” Tears streamed down his face.

“Don't cry boy,” the headman said in a gruff voice. “We have decided that you are not suitable to be a rice planter. You need another job and we've found you one. Drag this thing to Suzuka village. You'll find many fares in there.”

Two days later, Soun arrived in Suzuka village and, much to his consternation, the village was a kind of local headquarters for the First Airborne Division of the US Army. When he saw the weird oni wearing khaki uniforms, he very nearly had another demon fit. All he wanted at first was to drive them off the sacred lands of Amaterasu. He did, however, managed to contain himself.

“How 'bout that tall guy with the rickshaw?” One of the western oni asked in his incomprehensible tongue.

“What about him?”

“Can't he make beer run for us?”

“Good idea, Bob.”

Bob waved at Soun the way most westerners waved at people so Soun, being just as ignorant of the ways of westerners, waved back in the same fashion.

“Wave with your palm down and use only your wrist, Bob.”

“Oh, yeah I forgot,” Bob said as he changed the way he was waving.

Soun recognized this signal for what it meant. He was extremely hesitant, but his Tenno had ordered him to submit to these hideous oni, so he approached the nasty looking beast.

“He's just a kid!” Bob exclaimed.

The other oni said, “That don't matter here, man. They let kids buy anything in Japan.”

“So he can get us some smokes as well?”

After that, with much waving of hands and bad Japanese, Soun discovered that the oni wanted a case of beer and a carton of any kind of cigarettes that he could find. The trouble was, Soun had just arrived in the village. He did not know where anything was and did not know whom to ask.

He saw a man with a rickshaw and made the mistake of asking him where to find beer and cigarettes. The man snarled at him. Soun responded with an impromptu display of his hissing slobbering oni-head. The man fell on his knees and apologized. Begging Soun not eat his guts out of his belly.

You see, the Japanese that the human soul resides in the belly and that is what the oni like to eat. It is also why they rip open their bellies when committing ritual suicide, most often called seppeku, but most westerners know the Christian term for the act -- _harakiri_ \-- self-disembowelment.

Christian nihonjin were the only peoples in Japan that the khaki clad oni treated with any real respect. This caused Soun's ire against Christianity and Christians to grow much worse than it had already been. The man with the rickshaw told Soun where to find beer and cigarettes in such an humble way that he managed to make Soun feel pity. His oni head vanished as quickly as it came and he trotted off dragging his brand new rickshaw behind him, seeking the shop that had beer and cigarettes in stock.

Once he found the place, he realized that the owner was not particularly honest. He wanted twice the usual price for beer and cigarettes. Soun would not make any money with such charges and he was too tired to dicker with the man. He used his self-righteous oni head to intimidate him. The man offered Soun a case of beer and a carton of cigarettes for half the usual price. Soun paid him three quarters of the normal price and then trotted away to deliver the goods to his new masters -- the western oni.

The western oni proved to be quite generous. They gave him $50.00 in US Army scrip as a tip and told him who to see in order to get it converted into yen. Then they gave him a pack of cigarettes. That is when Soun picked up the tobacco habit. It plagued him for the remainder of his life. To be fair, everyone the world over smoked during those years, and almost none of them realized that the habit was ruining their health.

Nicotine is a very pernicious drug. It is the most addictive substance on earth. Its victims will cough their lungs out, and yet they will still insist that is not their smoking that is causing it. Nicotine is not only bad for the heart, lungs and vascular system, it affects one's ability to think rationally.

Fortunately for Soun, he could only smoke three or four cigarettes a day. Cigarettes were expensive and it was difficult to smoke them while pulling a rickshaw, so when he was pulling his rickshaw, he did not smoke. He would smoke at lunch and limit himself to one cigarette after he ate. Then he might indulge himself in two -- or perhaps -- three cigarettes after his evening meal. He otherwise would not have lived to the age 103. He might well have lived until age 150 had he not smoked at all.

The khaki clad oni began withdrawing from Japan in late 1948. He followed them north into the Tokyo area until virtually all of them left in 1950. Then he became desperate for a source of money. He tried several things, including working the daikon fields in Nerima. This was where he met Tendo Akiko. She was a magnificent naginataka and he enjoyed several bouts with her. She won against him two times out of three, but he did not mind that. She was really was that good. But the naginata would not make a living for him and he was still a mere agricultural laborer. It was better than planting rice, but he was entirely too tall to be thinning daikon seedlings. He had to find something else. He eventually found a flier lying in the street near the shack he had rented. What was written on the flier intrigued him, but he had to move fast to take advantage of it.


	2. Reaving

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A reaving we will go!  
> A reaving we will go!  
> Hi-ho, the derry-oh,  
> A reaving we will go!

Following the complex instructions, Soun arrived at the field designated by the flier. He was panting from his exertions. A large group of men, somewhere around a hundred of them in their early to middle twenties, had arrived ahead of him. All of them had found fliers promising an education that would lead to a lucrative career. The flier promised long term security to anyone who mastered the techniques to be taught in the classes. There was no charge to attend the classes. All the putative student needed to do was to show up before the teacher did. The time on the flier had given Soun fifteen minutes to reach a large empty field that was a twenty minute walk from the spot where he had found it, hence his sweating and breathlessness upon arriving.

He did not like the looks of most of the men in the crowd. All of them appeared to be petty criminals or slovenly bums -- too much like himself for comfort. While he was staring around at his ersatz companions, he backed into a fellow who resemble a stack of boulders rather than a man.

“Almost a hundred guys here and none of them suitable to be my partner,” a deep rumbling voice said. “What about you? You find anyone you want to partner with?”

Soun shook himself and laughed out loud. The man was roughly a half head shorter than himself with rapidly fading hair. He wore stained and tattered dougi and old fashioned glasses that had elastic string for earpieces.

“No, I haven't,” Soun replied.

“Mnph,” the man said as he extended his hand. “Saotome Genma.”

Soun took the man's hand and was surprised as his leathery palm came into contact with the gravelly surface of Genma's palm and the thick hardness of his slab like hand. “Nakahara Soun, here.”

The second their palms made contact, Soun felt his heart soar even as it simultaneously sank into a dark cold pit. Their fates were sealed that very second. Karma would conspire to weld their souls together back-to-back so that they would forever be forced to act as a single man. And that would shortly be necessary to their very survival, even though they did not realize it at the time.

"Awright, awright! Make a hole you lop-eared galoots!" A high-pitched and unfamiliar voice screamed over the general hubbub. "Make hole so I can get a good look at you bastards."

Soun was shocked out of his wits by the sight of a diminutive little man with the harsh voice and rude demeanor. He wore a tattered dougi that had been black once, but was now a oozy dark brown. Even the old man's belt was frayed. He had no hair on the top of his skull and even standing on his tiptoes he might have been a meter-and-a-half (4' 9") tall.

"Smèagol?" Genma asked in his grinding voice. Soun did a double take at him.

 _I underestimated Genma,_ he thought. _He's_ _better read_ _than I imagined him to be._

"The resemblance _is_ quite striking," Soun said. "Mind you, he lacks the slime covered skin. He does not appear to be human, does he?"

"Mmph!" Genma grunted in agreement.

Soun enjoyed communicating with someone on a gut level. Saotome was the very first person that he had ever met that actually understood him without his having to explain the details of his thinking. Soun also realized that he himself was likely the only person who would every understand the rock-like Genma Saotome.

"Whoo-whee! We've got some great big honkers in the crowd!" The strutting halfling exclaimed in his high-pitched voice. "All of you guys that are pretty near a full two meters in height come here!"

There were five men who fit that description, all of them their appearances. Three of them were something like 180 centimeters (6'), while the other two looked as though they really were approaching a full two meters (6'7").

"Okay, boys," the tiny old man said in sneering voice after the big men had gathered around him in a tight circle. "Think of me as a cockroach and try to stomp me to death."

The old man had used the old Japanese word of " _gokikaburi_ " instead of the modern Japanese word of " _gokiburi_ " for the word cockroach. It took everyone a few seconds to sort out what the old fart meant by his statement, but once it became clear to the towering men around him, they all began to stamp on the old man with disgust written on their faces.

The result was not the squashed old halfling that Soun quite reasonably expected. The result was five badly injured and blubbering men who were taller and stronger than Soun who, at 175 cm, was a tall man by Japanese standards at the time. Okay, one of them was not merely blubbering. He was screaming with pain.

"Eeee!"

"Now how many of you slugs saw what I did to defend myself?" The old man shouted.

No one raised their hand or said a word.

"Good! That just means I still got it," the ancient halfling shouted. "Which of you understands the importance of this skill?"  
The injured galoot screamed. "EEEE!"

Nearly everyone there raised their hand, including Genma and Soun. Genma caught the halfiing's eye.

"You, _Taiseki-san_ ,” the old halfling said pointing at Genma, “what do you think the value of it is?"

"To crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of their women!" Genma bellowed in his deep grinding voice. Soun shuddered, but the ancient halfling seemed delighted.

The halfling cackled as the injured giant cried, "Ooo, it hurts! It hurts!"

"Ya got that right, _Taiseki-kun_!" The evil old halfling cackled again. "You might well have the talent needed for what I am teaching, but the proof will be in the pudding."

The ancient little man craned his neck to look Soun in the eye. "And you look to be a kindred spirit, _Notsubo_ _-san_ . You should stick to _Taiseki_ _-san_ so that you can guard each other's backs. What I teach is the Anything Goes Style of Fighting." The balding gnome was now walking around cautiously eyeing the men in the crowd. All of them kept a careful distance and most failed to look the old creep in the eye as he stalked around in the same way very large men stalk around looming over everyone around them.

 The injured giant squealed yet again. "Yee!"

The behavior of the individual members of his newly acquired mob did not make any difference the old man. He had forgotten what the words respect and kindness meant better than two centuries ago.

"In the technique I teach, there is no room for hesitation; no room for kindness; no room for polite gestures or even honorable behavior. There is only the quick and the injured -- or dead! If this does not suit you, or you are not ruthless enough to do it, leave now before it's too late!"

"Eeee!" The injured giant again wailed. He had been the first to try to stamp on the ancient halfling. He had been wearing a pair of straw sandals that were still commonly found in those days and the old man had not hesitated to punch the middle of the arch or his right foot. Now the man's foot flopped in the middle like a wet rag. It was visibly swelling as the man's eyes bulged with fear and disbelief.

"EEEE -- ack!"

He was cut off in mid-scream by a kick to his forehead from the evil halfling. The injured man then lay on the ground as still as a corpse. Soun expected to see flies gathering round the body at any minute. He had never been so intimidated in all his life.

"You boys, what's left of you," -- roughly a third of the men were now fleeing like so many quail -- "call me Happosai. No titles or honorifics, just Happosai. Ya got that?"

"Yes, Happosai!" The sixty or so men shouted in chorus.

"Good boys!" Happosai chortled. "You stick with me and we'll live a grand life and might even die rich!"

"Happosai?" Soun said in a timid voice.

"Yes, _Notsubo_ _-san_?"

"May I ask a question?"

"You've already asked two questions, _Notsubo_ _-_ _kun_. What do you want to know? Spit it out already"

Soun glanced at Genma who barely nodded his head in silent reply.

"How old are you?"

"A century ago, I stopped counting birthdays and started counting the decades since my birthday."

This caused Soun to look askance, but Genma seemed to have heard something about this old monster. He only squinted at Happosai.

"Didn't expect ya to believe me, but it's the truth, _Notusubo_ _-kun_ _._ Now, we got a lotta work to do and too little time to do it in. How many of you boys have an appetite worked up?"

Soun heard one of the men shout, " _H_ _a_ _rapeko!_ " the Japanese word for starving. He and Genma took it up and the word became a chant that was almost religious in its fervor.

Happosai cackled and slapped his knees with both hands.

"I thought as much. Let's go, follow me!"

With that the old man spun on his heel and began hopping in long extremely high jumps, as though he were a souped-up flea powered by a turbo charged Deusenburg 8. Soun, along with all the other men in the mob, followed along behind the leaping old madman at a desperate sprint. Happosai led them into the part of the shopping district where there were numerous _yatai_ set up, selling all sorts of delectable street foods.

Happosai descended on a _takoyaki_ stand like a stooping peregrine. He snagged three skewers of the fried octopus balls in a single pass, consuming them in a flash. Everyone else in his violent and ravening entourage emulated him. They did not bother placing an order, begging or even asking. They simply snatched what they wanted and ate it in front of the now badly frightened owner-operators. Many of the frightened operators began offering cash to their unexpected raiders in hopes of getting them to go away and plague some other poor schmuck, but this was a mistake. It only encouraged the mob of student brigands to do even worse things.

By the time Happosai had hopped all the way down the length of the street, all that was left behind him and his impromptu horde were bare shelves and empty registers. The vendors were happy just to have been spared their daughters and their equipment.

Six kilometers or so (4 miles) out of town, Happosai stopped leaping and waited on his newly blooded bandits -- er -- students to catch up. As the first of them came into earshot, he began pontificating.

"You boys are gonna hafta learn to keep up with me if you wanna stay outta jail! The devil takes the hindmost in this line of work, make no mistake about it. I know, I know! You're winded and sweaty. So what? D'ya think that'll make any difference to the cops when they start clappin' irons on ya? Believe me when I tell you that all your weakened condition will do to them is to make them happy. You're just that much of an easier collar for 'em. Now, hitch up your britches and let's make some truly serious tracks!"

By sundown, there were only about fifty men out of the hundred or so they left the field with. Now, they were all wanted men. Their exploits had been fun while the thieving and eating were taking place, but now all of them had to face the fact that the were wanted felons.

Soun loved being able to terrify people with a harsh stare and an ugly snarl, something that he had already turned into a major martial arts technique. After all, why fight when all you need do is intimidate? But now, the fatigue had now worn the euphoria off. Guilt was now licking around his full belly, giving him twinges of indigestion.

"Relax Nakahara-kun," Genma said in his rock-on-rock rumble. "It was just food and petty cash. The cops won't come this far out. Especially not in forest this thick in these steep hills."

"You don't sound at all guilty, Saotome-kun."

"That's because I'm not," Genma said. He sounded completely relaxed as though what they had done was perfectly legitimate and righteous.

"How can you not fee guilty?" Soun demanded to know. "All those people were honest and hard working."

"Hard working, maybe," Genma said, "but honest? No way."

"How do you know that?" Soun asked.

"From firsthand experience," Genma answered. "Are you an orphan?"

"No, my father was a plantation owner in Korea throughout the war. All my mother did was to keep house. We were luckier than most."

“So you're _hikiagesha._ ”

“Yes.”

"Then you grew up differently than I did. My father's family were farmers and _yamabushi_ . My mother's people were restaurateurs and _ninja_. You would think that my mother's people would be willing to pay her husband's people fair prices for their foodstuffs, but no, they drove very hard bargains. Many times Dad would sell his goods to them for a fraction of what he could have gotten in town."

Soun grunted sympathetically. The yamabushi were followers of a very obscure and secretive relgion. They wondered about in the wilderness, testing themselves against nature. They had always been persecuted by the government. The government only liked secrets when the secrets belonged to the government. Genma's rumbling voice was laced with pain and frustration.

"I can still hear my mother crying after her rapacious kin left our farm. They repeatedly left us broke and my mother in tears. But that's not to say my dad and his family were innocent. He would raise his prices in a heartbeat during an emergency. He would double his prices during the typhoon season. Sometimes he would even triple them if Japan got hit by more than one of those bloody storms. Oh, and the prices he'd charge after a earthquake where horrifying."

Soun's next grunt was not quite so sympathetic. "Sounds to me as though you were worked hard and put to bed wet for all those years."  
"I was, but that ain't the half of it. You'd think that my mother's family would've given me at least a ten percent discount at their stands and yatai, but did they? Hell no! Not as much as a single yen. Sometimes they'd even add on to my bill after they found out who I was kin to. They typically charge at least four times the price of what the food they bought from us. All they had to do was to buy a little firewood and oil to cook it with."

Soun's grunt was a wee bit more sympathetic this time. "That still doesn't ease my conscience much, Saotome-kun."

"Well, look at it this way, what we did today was to improve their karmic balance. They'll have less to pay for in the next world."

"I can agree with that. Perhaps we _did_ do some good today. At least my belly is full. It has as been nearly a month since I had a full meal."

"Now it's time for us to get a nap."

"Don't think I can sleep right now."

"All right, I'll sleep for an hour or so. When you get sleepy, wake me up."

"I'll do that."

Genma went right to sleep. It was though he really was a stack of large rocks. He did not even snore. They took turns napping all the rest of that day and night.

* * *

 

Happosai was often self-indulgent and always evil in one way or another, but this did not mean that he was inefficient or less than frugal. He had led his bandits to a camp on a ridge between two steep running streams of clear water and the ayu (sweet-fish) were running.

In those days, the ayu were numerous and all the bandits needed to do the next morning was to catch enough fish to make a meal with their bare hands. Happosai taught them to thread the fish on long skinny stakes and then jobbing the stakes into the ground around a blazing fire. The fish would be well done inside of twenty minutes.

Soun was deeply impressed by how good such rough food tasted. All it really needed was a touch of salt, but he did not miss that. The flesh reminded him of cucumbers and cantaloupe. He had never had any trouble eating those without salt.

It turned out that the gang _needed_ a high protein diet. Happosai started teaching them how to jump the way he could as soon as they had filled their bellies. This harsh treatment resulted in another ten or so members walking away from the gang. Had it not been for his commitment to Genma, Soun would have joined the departing half-score of men. That was when it dawned on both Genma and Soun that Happosai was thinning out his newly acquired gang -- er -- class.

Happosai was teaching his evil ways, but the gathering of students were enduring roughly the same things as any other class of martial arts students, just a less civilized version of the same educational material.

But small differences do make a huge difference in the end. Soun and Genma vowed to learn all of Happosai's nasty tricks, then find a way to put them to better moral use. They, like nearly every other Japanese person, did not believe in absolute perfection. Everyone had a touch of evil in them. The trick to getting into heaven, if you believe in that sort of thing, was to maintain a balance of action for the good over action for evil. They reasoned that if they took evil techniques and harnessed them to achieving good, then their karma would balance out on the positive side.

For the next two years, they darkened their karmic ledger considerably with evil, because Happosai was an exceedingly evil little man. He had huge appetites, not all of them obvious at first, and he was determined to gratify his dark desires. He used his students as a means to those evil ends. In fact, he used them completely up at a rapid pace. The gang went through several recruitment cycles just to keep its numbers up during those two years, yet Genma and Soun clung to their posts like hungry ticks on a dog's back. They had truly dark streaks in their souls and enjoyed aiding Happosai in his debauchery.

* * *

 

 

As the raids became more organized, more efficient and safer for the gang, Happosai's evil desires became more bizarre and distasteful -- even to his fast associates. In those dark days, sanitary napkins made of disposable paper were not available in Japan. Happosai developed a fetish for what women used in the place of the disposable napkins, which meant that a village of any size would have numerous samples of these undergarments hanging out to dry for at least one week out of any give month.

Happosai gathered these "treasures" for himself on his own, but he would send his students out on noisy raids to create a diversion. With all the men and boys busy with the unexpected raids, he would have the time to collect what he treasured. These raids could be, and often were, for just anything that the gang needed at the moment, They almost always went on a rampage _after_ Happosai got a whiff of his treasures being hung out to dry.

Most of the time the gang stole cooked food. Happosai saw no point in robbing anything to cook If he stole food, it was almost always cooked by someone other than himself and so it was for his gang -- er -- martial arts class.

There were two exceptions to this rule. The first exception was sweet potatoes. Happosai loved to roast his sweet potatoes by hand over a blazing fire. The other exception was any game or fish they caught. He would happily roast them over a fire. But if the foodstuff required so much as a single pot, he shunned it altogether or stole it already cooked.

He did allow his men to cook stolen rice in their own pots, but he frowned on it. The pots had to be light weight an easily carried out of sight. Soun and Genma learned to get by on boiled rice and mayonnaise during this two years. Genma would steal the occasional head of cabbage or even a big daikon, but those instances were few and far between. So they either stole dried rice, not often, or they stole their meals already cooked.

Soun had to admit that this policy was a good balance between risk and reward, but Happosai was so damned ruthless about sticking to these rules that he came to despise the little creep for it almost as he despised the dirty old man's fetish for women's bloody underwear. He was so hungry for a home cooked meal that he would have committed murder to have it.

Happosai was big on stealing stuff that could be sold, but not on stealing actual money in any serious quantities. The reason for this was the behavior of the police. Rob a bank and the cops would chase you until they caught you, but steal enough bicycles to make just as much money as you could walk out of a small town bank with after an armed or strong-arm heist, and you would have the same money with a fraction of the heat.

Nobody could fan up a white hot heat over a missing bicycle. Soun quickly realized that he would never get a grip on how many of those contraptions they had stolen. The ones showing some wear they kept for themselves to ride on raids and escapes. The better looking ones they sold in villages where they had not just recently stolen bikes.

They had stolen enough lawnmowers, snowblowers and chainsaws to outfit several small towns. They made a good profit on such items by stealing them in the small villages and then selling them for next-to-nothing in the larger towns. The men who peddled the stolen items were always their newest recruits and knew the least about the gang -- er -- class. All the men in charge of what went on at these sales wore clown costumes and pretended to be local hirelings. They were often arrested, but then almost always released as innocent day laborers.

These tricks will work two or three times in a given locale, but to be safe, the gang had to stay on the move. With the economy in a steady decline, seldom admitted to by any of the Japanese politicians, Happosai never had a problem recruiting more men to refill the gang's ranks -- er -- that is acquiring new students for his classes.

Officially, they were a school of martial artists devoted to defending the weak and reinforcing social order, not filthy bandits guilty of strong arm robberies and pilfering. Such crimes were merely for the sake of their survival.

By the time the first year had gone by, Soun was well and truly sick of being a ruffian. He also got tired of living in the Touhoku region of Honshu. The sky was nearly always grey, and when the skies were not grey, it turned bitter cold or sweltering hot. The flies and mosquitoes were a constant source of torment and let's not speak of the leaches and occasional bouts of dysentery. Several of the gang died from dysentery. Other than this, he found that he and Genma were well suited to it. Genma having been raised in the Yamabushi Cult, was especially fond of being a backwoods ruffian. He had taken to the lifestyle like a duck took to water.

Soun could easily see how the first year might stretch into a decade or even a lifetime, but things change over time. The gang's numbers waxed and waned as they took casualties and members were arrested. Some of them were killed by the furious townspeople, in which case they simply vanished from everyone's memory.

People living in the tiny villages of Touhoku were largely bereft of government services, particularly in the realm of law enforcement during those days, so they were very much inclined to take the law into their own hands. This led to himself, Genma and Happosai discovering something incredibly valuable. They made this discovery even as the gang -- er -- class was broken up by a mob of irate villagers.

It was during the the tail end of _tsuyu_ , the rainy season, and the ladies personal items were especially fragrant. Happosai ordered his -- er -- class to raid the yatai and food stands during the local T _anabata_ _M_ _atsuri_ , or Star Festival, which always started at sunset.

The simulataneous raids started off quite nicely. Soun had a grand old time staring vendors into simply giving him whatever delicacy they were making. He and Genma set about gorging themselves. Genma would start grabbing without asking or offering to pay and as soon as the owner opened his or her mouth to object, Soun would give them his vicious stink eye stare. If any more was required, Soun would even snarl a little.

They had gobbled up several meals in sequence: yakitori (chicken threaded on bamboo skewers and roasted over coals), karepan (deep fried sweet buns with a Japanese curry filling), tomorokoshi (roasted sweet corn),nikuman (a pork filled bun) and even, surprise, surprise, ikayaki (fire roasted squid on a stick).

Soun was surprised to see squid this far inland and so was Genma. As they walked up to the ikayaki vendor salivating, they heard a very loud bang. A “classmate” of theirs who happened to be walking right beside Genma fell down and remained very, very still. Another loud report and another of their “classmates” fell down and bled profusely while his limbs twitched and jerked.

Soun's ever present _zanshin_ , or danger sense, warned him of trouble and he instictively ducked. He was tall enough that the bullet missed him and everyone behind him, but the buleet aimed at Genma hit someone else in the head, splashing brains everywhere. Soun felt a pang of sorrow for the unfortunate dead sod, and hoped that it was of his fellow ruffians rather than one of the villagers. He put those feelings aside and executed their pre-planned ex-filtration strategy.

The gang -- er -- class always got together and pre-planned their retreat if a fast exit became necessary. They had learned to take this precaution the hard way after the villagers began to stand up for themselves. This time, the plan was for the gang -- er -- class to run up a heavily forested slope. Unfortunately, this village was in the high country and lay in a deep bowl shaped valley in the mountains. Once the excitement started, half the -- er -- class forgot which way to run. They scattered like quail instead of running all in one direction, which meant that they could not fight a rear guard action.

Seeing no organized resistance, just panicked flight, the furious villagers packing their illegal rifles chased the -- er -- class. Unbeknownst to Happosai and his merry band of -- er -- students, the villages had gotten together and formed a posse -- er -- militia. Most of this countervailing group were made up of war veterans and they knew how to fight.

They ran and climbed and clambered until breathing became difficult. The villagers' militiamen tenaciously following every step they made.

It is very difficult to hide your tracks when you are so many. Especially when you are fleeing up a soft slope. The villagers also had dogs of the akita breed and akitas, large and very strong dogs, have very good noses and sharp teeth. They ate everyh one of Soun's fellow students. Those who were not eaten by the akita, were tormented to death by the militiamen and then their bodies were cut into pieces and fed to the packs of akita a piece at a time.

Finally, it was just Happosai, Genma and Soun running away and the militiamen commissioned by the villagesfinally decided that justice had been done and that the threat had been sufficiently diminished. They broke off their pursuit and returned home, but the trio of “martial artists” were now lost in an area that was all snow covered rock that was dark gray to black and had broad vitreous white stripes in it.

The Trio of Evil was now so high up that they could look down and see the lights of several differnt villages. It was impossible to say which way would be safe for them to travel and worse, they were completely lost. The sky turned overcast during the chase and so they could not see the stars to navigate. They blundered about in desperation for two, perhaps three hours, until finally, about halfway down one of the helter-skelter slopes, they found hot water bubbling up out of a crack when Genma stepped into it.

“Itai! You could cook an egg in this!” Genam screamed.

A rivulet ran down from the tiny hot spring, forming a narrow rill.

“Okay, let's follow this little stream,” Happosai said.

Soun and Genma looked askance at him.

“Don't be stupid! Where there's water, even boiling water, there's people. This will turn into a stream and then into a river.”

“And villages always spring up around rivers,” Genma said.

Soun, having a hard time breathing, just nodded his head.

“So, why are you standin' around here with your teeth in your mouth?” Happosai shouted over his shoulder as he leapt into the air. “Follow me, assholes!”

Genma eagerly followed their diminutive master, Soun paused to give out a heartfelt groan then, with a painful shrug of his shoulders, he went hopping from one boulder to the next down the hill following the Happosai. The little man was like a force of nature; one cold only try to cope with and survive him. Resisting him was futile.

The rivulet turned into a rushing stream, then a wider fast moving stream that made chuckling noises with fog billowing over it. Soun could see metallic flashes from time to time below the clear running water. He spent no time thinking about what he saw. He was entirely too engrossed in the dangerous task of rock hopping to focus on thosemetallic reflections. The rocks were silppery and almost as hard and cruel as Happosai. He did not want to be left behind with a broken leg or arm. He especially did not want to fall into the still boiling stream and be left to cook. Either fate loomed as a definite possibility.

The hopping demanded more of his attention than he had available, not to mentions his rapidly waning strength. Just as Soun's legs started screaming at his brain to stop making them jump, the Trio of Evil reached a cliff where the now large stream poured over a water fall. The water fell about a hundred feet into a large swirling plunge pool. By now the waters of the stream were nearly the same temperature as ice.

The three of them lay down on their bellies and sucked the sweet water rich with minerals up with their mouths. The water was freezing cold and their faces turned from beet red to purplish-blue.

Happosai got Soun's attention by giving his right buttock a stout kick.

“You boys go gather wood. I'm gettin' a chill.”

Neither Genma nor Soun complained. They were already shivering, the old man was standing there managing to look imperious while his teeth chattered and he rubbed his upper arms with his hands.

There was plenty of dry driftwood along the upper banks of the stream. Happosai had already formed a pile of kindling and had it burning as they piled driftwood around him. Soon, they had a roaring fire to sit near.

Not being shy with one another, they stripped off their wet clothing and hung them near the fire to dry, while they sat on the cold boulders shivering in their bare skin.

“I guess we look for a portage after we warm up,” Soun said through chattering teeth.  
“Nnn.” Genma grunted his agreement.“Yeah, well, I say we take advantage of this high spot first and see what we can see,” the ever cautious Happosai said. “Stand up, Notsubo-kun.”

Soun stood up without complaint, but squawked with outrage once the very naked Happosai lit like a smelly bird on his shoulders.

“Quit making that noise!” Happosai ordered. “You might let someone know that we're here.”

Genma laughed. “That would be a real sight! You two look like k _ajigababa_.”

“Shut up, Saotome-kun!” Soun fought off the urge to use his angry oni head attack. “Or we'll put you on the bottom of the stack.”

Genma slapped his thigh and cackled. “I'll be happy to join you if you need me.”

“I see a column of smoke!” Happosai exclaimed. “It's one or two ri away.” The Japanese ri is the old measurement of distance that is just about 2.44 miles. Like many elderly people, Happosai never really got a grip on the newfangled metric system Japan had adopted decades previous.

“How much smoke is there?” Genma asked, suddenly serious.

“Probably just enough for a campfire, maybe a little more,” Happosai said.

“Which direction?” Soun asked.

“Just off to the right. Might even be on the stream bank iffen the stream curves in that direction.”

“Mmph!” Genma grunted. “Where there's a campfire...”

“There'll be food!” Soun finished Genma's sentence.

Happosai jumped down to the ground.

“We'll wait for our clothes to get dry and warm up,” Happosai said with an evil cackle. “I wanna take whoever's sittin' next to that fire by surprise.”

His two students nodded in agreement. They had long ago become accustomed to hostile greetings in the Touhoku region of Honshu, especially when they were few in number. The gang -- er -- class had worn out its welcome in Touhoku months ago. The denizens of the region no longer bought their stories about their being wondering martial artists out on a _yamagomori_ (training trip in the wilderness). As far as the Touhoku-jin were concerned by now, they were the last three living members of an infamous gang of thugs and pirates.

By the time their clothing dried, they were toasty warm and ravenous. The trio of evil made haste to find a way to climb down beside the waterfall and then hip-hopped downstream. Soun was aghast at who they found sitting by the campfire. It was an aging western oni wearing rags and a scraggly blonde beard with round, deep blue eyes. He seemed to look right through Soun. After an exceedinly uncomfotable pause, the western oni threw his head back, staring up at the sky.

“Thank ye o God for sending me this help!” The blonde oni shouted in almost incomprehensible Japanese with his arms held up wide and palms up. He was a head taller than Soun, which meant that he towered over the dwarfish Happosai. Happosai was not the least bit intimidated.

“Help for what, you fucking gaijin?” Happosai asked as he landed right in the middle of the man's striking range. Soun could see that there was little to no danger. The big gaijin had no _zanshin_ whatsoever.

Genma simply stood watching with a wry grin on his face.

The babbling giant oni had to make three tries before any of them understood.  
“Gold?” Soun asked as he looked and Genma. Greed came alive in the face of the ambulatory stack of boulders. Soun did not realize that Genma's expression was a reflection of his own.

“Gold!” Genma rumbled.

“Diggin' gold?” Happosai screamed. “Where?”

“Right here,” the blonde gaijin said. “All around us. There's tons and tons of it.”

All three of the Trio of Evil stared around. The only thing they could see was striped rock and large boulders, interspersed with scraggly trees and patches of snow.

“I know, I know! You boys don't know a quartz storm when ya see it, but its right here under your noses!” The disheveled western oni shouted.

Happosai and his students responded with baffled stares.

“Goddammit! I shudda known you boys wouldn't unnerstand!” The towering gaijin shouted in English. “Quartz storm -- _sekiei arashi_. _Wakarimas_ _u_ _yo?_ ”

Soun scratched his head.

Genma asked in a rumbling voice,”How can there be a storm in quartz? It's a kind of rock.”

“Yeah, explain this shit,” Happosai said. “Before I lose patience with your fat clumsy ass.”

“It happened a long, long time ago. Nobody knows why or how it happens, but there be veins of quartz running out in all directions from this very spot. Most of it has gold, copper and silver mixed in with it, but there's some veins with lotsa embedded gold in 'em. Gold so thick that it has formed knotted wires!”

“Knotted wires...” Soun started to say.

“Of gold.” Genma finished.

“Gold that thick?” Happosai asked in a challenging voice. “Show us the gold!”

“Under one condition,” the tottering gaijin said.

“What's that?” Happosai asked.

“You boys stay here and hep me dig more of it up.”

“You got any food?” Genma asked. He was starving, which was not particularly unusual, he was almost always hungry, but the other two of the Trio of Evil were grateful he asked. They were starving as well.

“Don't worry 'bout that!” The gaijing snapped. “Got plenty of grub. I get my staples from a village down slope. What they don't have, I catch or kill.”

“Sake?” Happosai asked, sounding suspicious.

“Nope, no saki. It's hard to get up here plus I can't stand the taste of it, but I got four or five barrels of _shouchuu_.

“How much gold do we get if we help you dig?” Soun asked.

“I'll give you boys half the gold we dig up.”

“Deal!” The Trio of Evil shouted in chorus.

“Gonna hafta eat first,” Genma said. “M' hungry.”

“Awright, awright,” the towering gaijin said with a rapidly growing grin. “Right this way. I gotta shack down there a ways. We'll go down there and whip us up a good meal.”

It turned out that the elderly gaijin, he told them his name was Goldie, was a very good cook. Seems that he had always been the cook at every mine he had ever worked in. His skill at cooking was one of the things that got him good paying jobs, even on marginal mines that did not payoff that well for their owners.

Goldie regaled them with all sorts of incomprehensible mining terms, almost none of which were easily translated into ordinary Japanese and all but a few were very difficult to pronounce, let alone spell in the katakana. Soun tried to take some notes, but quickly lost track and stopped. Goldie will still spouting off his knowledges as the Trio of Evil fell into a deep sleep. They had exhausted themselves running from the villagers and their bodies had been fending off the cold of the high country for a day and a night. Once they began to drown Goldie out with their snores, he shutup.

Goldie pulled a pipe and lit it as he sat down in a hand made rocking chair. He took a long pull on the pipe and puffed out smoke rings and smiled. He looked down at the sleeping Trio of Evil and gave them a fond smile.

“You jest don't know how happy I am that you're here,” he spoke alound in English. “Now, with your help, we can stipe back in to the richest shaft. Then, I'll be rich and you three will simply disappear. This here mine's dangerous. Lots of loose rock to get buried under. You boys won't get outta here alive.”

Then Goldie threw his head back and let a long loud guffaw. The laugh was so evil that it would have made Happosai shiver, but he did not hear it. He had fallen into an exhaustion induced state of complete oblivion.


	3. Caused by Gold Fever (revised 01)

Murder and mining have gone hand-in-hand at least since the times of ancient Egypt, probably well before that. Whenever something valuable is discovered, humans contract this thing called “gold fever.” What they find and dig up need not be gold, but gold is certainly the most common cause known of this nasty infection. Its symptoms are hearts possessed by feverish greed made worse by the burning desire to control the source of the new found wealth.

In the early days of civilization, gold was almost always found in nearly pure form in nature, as was silver and copper. Sometimes though, a gold alloy named electrum was found. Electrum is a naturally occurring alloy of just over fifty percent gold combined with silver and copper. Electrum takes on a greenish tint if the only metal other than gold is in it is silver, but all it takes is a tiny touch of copper to turn electrum pale gold or even white gold. More copper than silver results in a pink alloy called rose gold. It is sometimes found in nature as well.

The earliest of all known coins were made from the alloy electrum.

Gold fever changes the behavior of its victims, and the secret gold strike in high Touhoku, had more than one victim well prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Its first victim went by the name of Goldie. No one knew what his family name was. When asked who he was, he would say Goldie and nothing more, but if you even pretended to listen, he would regale you with outlandish stories about his past.

He claimed that his family hailed from the Darling river bottom in Australia, and that he had learned basic cooking from his father on a riverboat because his mother was a drunken whore who could not cook at all. The Darling is infamous for drying up. It dried up sixty times between 1854 and 1954, and on one of those occasions, the owner of the boat that Goldie and his father worked could not make his mortgage payments his riverboat. The boat was repossessed by the guy who had loaned the owner money. The new owner decided that a change of crew was necessary and Goldie and his father were out of a job as well as a place to live.

Pap, Goldie always referred to his father as “Pap,” settled in a little town along the Darling with the impossible to pronounce name of Waikerie, where he and Goldie opened a bakery. It did not take Goldie long to realize that he would never be a good baker -- So did Pap. Pap gave Goldie more money than the bakery could really afford and Goldie set off to find his fortune at the ripe old age of seventeen.

Goldie's first job was cooking at a tiny diner in a miserable little town in the deep outback. Two drovers who were regular customers talked him into ditching his job and going with them to the newly discovered gold fields. The first mine owner who hired him went broke, but Goldie did well. He was working as both cook and part time miner and the two jobs together paid well.

One such arrangement led to another similar deal and, pretty soon, Goldie had seen far too many of the harshest godforsaken places on Earth, but he learned a great deal about mining and cooking as well. Knowing how to cook food that tasted good was an invaluable skill and he honed his cooking skills to a very fine edge, learning how to use the local spices in whatever he cooked.

He was especially kind to the ladies everywhere he went. Not only were they pleasant company, many of them knew secrets to cooking that he found almost a valuable as the gold he pretended to be working for. Goldie was an affable and outgoing man and all he really wanted was company and good paying work. It turned out that he was able to acquire both everywhere he traveled.

There are several versions of how he wound up in Touhoku, but the simplest version of the tale is that he had hitched a ride on a whaler that stopped in Sapporo to coal up. While the ship was being coaled up, her skipper got into trouble with the local law enforcement. This was in 1900 or thereabouts and the local law enforcement was Dutch, not Japanese.

Goldie took several jobs in sequence, none of them lasting more than a month. He had great difficulty coping with the Dutch language and had even less luck with Dutch disposition. Finally, he was approached by a Nihonjin of substance, a merchant, who had a deep dark secret and who needed a cook to travel with him to a remote location in the high country of Touhoku.

Goldie did not hold out a lot of hope for the operation. He had seen too many fields that suddenly turned barren and thereby broke its miners, but he went along as the cook thinking that he would hang on until the merchant's money ran out. Much to his shock, this find turned out to be a what the Spaniards would have called, “ _¡_ _L_ _a bonanza!_ ”

He had never seen quartzite as riven with electrum and other metals. He could pull on a chunk of quartzite and it would crumble in his hands, leaving gold or silver clumps and wires in his grip. The problem with it was that the richest quartzite was far under the mountain and that required them to dig a very long, narrow and fragile adit.

The muck the adit had to be drifted through alternated between a mix of loose muddy clay and gravel to incompetent breccia. Goldie could not decide which drift float was worse, the suffocating mud or the bone crushing chunks of breccia. Both were deadly if not handled properly and the stubborn or desperate merchant certainly had the money, but lacked the patience to handle them properly.

Worse, the merchant simply too greedy to care about his miners. He pushed them hard and there were numerous collapses at the entrance of the mine. Men died. Women died. Children died. The merchant became even more desperate and panicky. The more frightened the man became, the harder he pushed the amateur miners, most of whom had been recruited from nearby farms. They knew about digging sure, but digging a hard rock mine? They were killing themselves with their ignorance and the merchant knew as little about digging mines as a parrot

After a few months of this mayhem, the merchant made the “mistake” of trying to light a his pipe near a keg of black powder. His former “employees” gathered up the merchant's tatters, put them in a bag and then walked down the hill with Goldie watching their departing backs. They would never willingly return. They left him there alone.

He was not about to leave. Goldie knew right then that he would die there in the high mountains of Touhoku. He had finally caught gold fever and this was the richest gold field he had ever seen. All the others he had seen had either played out quickly, or were bought by some moneybags investors who did not know diddly about mining. Stiping back through the collapsed adit was not a one man job, but there was always more than one way to skin a cat if a man was determined enough.

The richest vein ran way under the mountain beneath ton after ton of loose overburden and hard mountain rock, but there were other less rich veins in the area that could be taken advantage of. In fact, there were loose chunks of gold bearing quartz lying about on the ground. All Goldie need do was to break these rather friable chunks up so that he could separate the precious metals from the quartz.

There are a variety of mechanical means that can be used to separate metals from their quartzite ore, there is the hammer-mill, most often driven by water, there is a barrel with steel or cast iron balls in called the ball mill, it too is often driven by water and then there is the arrastra, which is a circular pit with a post in the center. The post is used as an axle for a wheel or T-bar at the top and and have another cross arm at the bottom to which two slabs of rock or concrete are attached by chains running through eye-bolts.

With the arrastra, a goodly amount of raw ore is put in the pit and then the axle is forced to turn, usually by a pair of donkeys, and that causes the slabs to be dragged round and round on top of the ore. This breaks the ore down to a powdery flour like substance rather quickly -- finely ground quartz with gold, silver and copper flakes in it.

This brought up another woe for Goldie. He had never learned any carpentering or fabrication skills that miners use to build such vital machines. He knew how they worked and he had the wood, but Japanese tools were very strange to him. Their planes cut on the pull stroke as did their saws. Their chisels were as sharper than newly honed razors -- but the oddly shaped chisels put him off, as though they were as big a threat to him as they were to the wood they were meant to cut. And, what in heaven's name is a shaku? He did not have a clue about Japanese standards of measurement.

Goldie struggled for almost a month building an arrastra successfully, only to discover that he could not use it by himself. Such machinery was designed to be driven by pairs of donkeys or oxen, but the locals did not have such animals. They relied on their own backs to plant and harvest their crops. Only the Japanese military had such beasts of burden and the military was not inclined to share or lease their animals.

This forced him to adapt and overcome. He built a one man hammer-mill. It was just a rough pit chipped out of the native rock. He would fill that with the friable gold bearing quartzite, then pound it into powder with a heavy log that he capped the end of with a piece of heavy sheet metal. It worked well enough, but he could only work small amounts of ore at the time, a couple of kilograms at most, and that left him with finely ground quartzite mixed with precious metal flakes in it.

There are several ways to separate gold from its ore, one involves mercury, the mercury will dissolve gold into solution and one can then separate them by heating the gold bearing mercury in a retort, recapturing the cooled mercury as it goes from vapor to liquid in the long neck of the retort. Then, it is a simple matter to take the top of the retort off and scrape the gold out of its body.

Goldie did not have a retort and did not have a clue about how to build one. And would not have tried in any case because mercury vapor is as deadly as a rifle bullet. One whiff of it is fatal. He had seen that happen more than once.

The other way is to use cyanic acid, another toxic substance that will dissolve gold but not the rock, then evaporate leaving the gold behind, but he did not have any of that chemical on hand and would not have used if he had it because it would take up the space in your red blood cells that oxygen would normally take up and thereby suffocate you slowly and painfully. At this point in time, using cyanide was the more common way of separating gold from its ore, and Goldie had seen many cases of cyanide poisoning in miners.

This meant that he had to resort to sluicing or panning the finely ground ore for the valuable metals in it. This worked. It was not efficient, but it worked. He sluiced it first, then he panned the tailings from the sluice box recovering the finer gold flakes. There was no way to get all of the metals in this manner, so Goldie was careful to store the last of the tailings safe place where they would not be washed into one of the nearby streams.

He hated working this way because the clear waters in the area chilled him down to the bone. On days when he would be involved in sluicing and panning, he would spend a day gathering deadfall to burn. He would start the fire on the morning that he would start sluicing. When he got cold enough that he could not stop his teeth from chattering, he would stand by the fire to warm up. After working the sluice boxes, he would pan through the tailings. That mean even more exposure to the bone chilling water.

At the end of the day, he would heat water in a large cast iron pot, pour it into a large wheelbarrow and then cool it down with water from the stream. Then, he washed off the accumulated grime and sweat while warming up.

All this made for a very tough and very lonely life for Goldie. He was a stranger in a strange land. He had no company unless he went looking for it and he dared not travel very far from the quartz storm for fear of it being pilfered by someone. It turned out that pilfering was much less of a threat then he imagined.

Nearly all of the people living within twenty-miles (32 km) considered the place to be a breach between the normal world and the after world, or a _Meido_ \-- that part of the underworld where your soul goes after death if you have been less than perfect. It is overseen by an entity called _Itako_ , presumably a blind, female who constantly suffers from something like severe PMS. No one wanted to get near the place. They did not even want to talk about it. They had even begun moving further away before Japan attacked the Yankees at Pearl Harbor.

When Goldie learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor, he spent a lot of his hard earned electrum buying up supplies. He had been forced to travel long distances to four villages to acquire enough foodstuffs and other consumables to tide him over. He knew full well that Japan would lose to the United States. He had been to the United States and he knew full well what the Americans were capable of. The poor ignorant and misbegotten Japs had not a single clue about what they had done. They had picked a fight with a vengeful giant who would stamp the life out of them as though they were mere ants.

Most memories are short and die out as the second generation passes, but the villagers of high Touhoku did still accept the electrum that Goldie brought down the hill with him in exchange for foodstuffs and other items. This was how he acquired the supplies he needed to live such a high place with its thin air and frigid waters.

He worked away at the merchant's mining claim for decades without being disturbed in any way until the Japanese military attacked Hawaii. After the Japanese victory over Pearl Harbor, the villagers vanished. They disappeared in a slow trickle at first, but then the trickle turned into a rapid torrent. The torrent did not last long the high valleys were suddenly empty of people, save for Goldie.

Living by himself, Goldie only ever had the vaguest notion of what day of the week it might be. He only barely kept up with what month he was stumbling through, and that was only because of changes in the weather. He did not even know what year that the attack on Pearl Harbor had taken place, but he did at least count the years after that. It was seven long years before anyone returned to the high valleys. When he spied the smoke from their fires, he leapt for joy. Tea at last, maybe even coffee! Certainly at least some dried fruit for a change.

Goldie had run very low on supplies. He had been braving the cold waters to catch ayu and trout salting or smoking them, and gathering the few alpine plants that he knew were edible. He was ever so grateful to see smoke from a fire that he had not built. He bagged up a good load, two kilograms or so, of electrum nuggets in a leather bag, put the bag in his ragged old rickshaw and set off down the hill before sunup the next day.

Just as he reached the edge of highest village in the valley, a roiling fog streamed in around him as he started winding his way around all the dilapidated buildings. This was very disconcerting. The fog swirled around in a very unnatural way and even though it was already cold, the air grew much colder. It was not what he had come to expect from a fog. Fog in a high valley usually meant the air was warm and moist, but not this time. This fog was warm and wet and licked at his face like a hungry lion giving flesh a taste before biting into it.

It did not take long for his brain to start trying to create patterns in the swirling mists around him. The fog was so thick that it dampened all sound, yet Goldie could swear that he was hearing the cackle of old women nearby. Then, suddenly, he started seeing age ravaged faces made up of swirls in the twitching fog.

“Good morning _Ouzii-san_ ,” the eldest of the three said. This old woman was completely blind. Some terrible disease had forced her eyes to screw tightly shut and she was completely toothless. Between that and her Japanese-English pidgin, Goldie was barely able to understand her.

“Good morning _O_ _u_ _b_ _a_ _aba-_ _sama_ ,” Goldie replied as he tipped his ragged fur hat. “I hope that you are doing well.”

“I am to be sure, Honorable Ouzii-san,” the old woman replied with a toothless grin which made Goldie's stomach lurch.

“But you will not be doing so well in a day or two,” the withered old lady said with a smug look on her face. “You have not mastered the art of leading other men.”

The second of the three elderly women nodded her head in agreement. Her face was greatly ravaged by age. She could only see with her left eye, her right eye was screwed shut in much the same fashion of the first old woman who spoke, but she had a single tooth in the left side of her mouth. In the same kind of badly pronounced and garbled pidgin she asked, “Have you heard about the bandit gang that has been plaguing the lands north of here, Ouzii-san?”

Goldie nodded his head. “Yes, I have heard a thing or two about them, but they haven't been doing that much harm, all said and done.”

All three of the ancient crones cackled at this.

“All but three of that nasty gang have been hunted down and killed by packs of Akita-dogs. The dogs are owned by the people living north of this ridge, Ouzii-san,” the third hag said, barely suppressing another cackle. Her left eye was screwed tightly shut and she had but a single tooth in the right side of her mouth.

“The three strongest and fleetest of foot of them are headed for your precious mine,” the first hag said with a harsh cackle.

“They will arrive there sometime day after tomorrow,” said the second hag.

“You must take charge of them upon their arrival, or they'll take charge of you and you shall die a very painful death,” the third hag said followed by an even nastier cackle than her other two sisters had already given Goldie.

Sweat broke out on Goldie's face despite the cold and the fog surrounding him.

“What do they look like?” Goldie asked. “Describe them to me!”

The eldest hag, the one who was completely blind and toothless replied first. “The oldest and most powerful of the three is an ancient Yamabushi. He has turned to evil to preserve his worthless life. He is aged beyond your imagination and is capable of doing great harm. He has turned into an evil imp. Be extremely cautious of him. We think that he will be the one who will kill you.”

“The youngest of the three is tall and lanky,” the third hag said. “He has suffered much injustice and his soul has soured. He is both _nukekubi_ _(neck-less with a floating head)_ and _rokurokubi_ _(long curling neck with an ugly face)_ , curses that are mostly suffered by women. Because he is a man and very good with the naginata, he is able to trigger the curses on his own during the daytime,” the youngest hag pronounced. “Do not cross him if you can avoid it. He is very deadly.”

“And the large chunky one who resembles a stack of boulders is a young Yamabushi,” the middle hag said. “He has lost his faith in the Gods, yet he prefers the harsh life of an ascetic. Being an ascetic means that he almost never has to work. He is both sneaky and cunning. He could kill you before you ever knew that he decided to make you dead. His training has given him great and very strange powers. Be very careful of him and watch your back.”

Goldie stood frozen in shock. “You three are the Fates, aren't you?”

The three old women cackled rather than answering his question.

“Just you take heed, Ouzii-san,” they chorused as they became part of the roiling mist. “Lest you want to be murdered.”

And then the haze vanished, leaving cold blue skies behind it with Goldie standing in the middle of the abandoned village. He shivered before taking the handles of his battered rickshaw and winding his way through the higgledy-piggledy streets. Some of them had been paved with cobbles, but most of them were just hard packed earth.

Once he reached the next village downhill, there were a few people that he knew and who knew him. They were living in tents provided by the US Army. The supplies they had were far better than he had ever been able to buy before and they were grateful for his hard won electrum. He stayed the night, ate hearty and left the next morning with a heavily laden rickshaw.

He had just parked the rickshaw and had gotten a fire going when the three bandits of the prophecy showed up.

“I know you're out there, Touzoku-san,” Goldie said with a genuine smile. “I can smell you. There are three of you. One of you is old and short. Another one of you is young and lanky and then there is another one of you who is powerfully built.”

“That's quite a nose you have there, Gaijin-san,” a creaky old voice said. A wizened little man suddenly appeared from nowhere as though he had been invisible. “What do you do around here?”

“I dig up electrum,” Goldie answered honestly. There was no way for him to hide his wealth so he may as well be honest about it. “You're welcome to dig here as well if you want.”

“Electrum, eh?” The old man asked. “What's that?”

Goldie handed him a nugget. “It's this stuff. It's an alloy of gold and silver. “About half gold in this place.”

The old man weighed the nugget with his hand, clearly impressed. “How many yen do you get for it?”

“Don't know. Never sold any for yen.”

“So, what d'ya do with it then? Eat it?”

“He trades it for supplies, Master,” Soun interjected. He dropped a bag of American made cookies at Happosai's feet.

Goldie was shocked by the lanky man's sudden appearance. He had been standing in a shadow for all that time without Goldie noticing him.

“You got those off of my...”

“Rickshaw,” Genma said in his grinding voice. “You should have hidden it better.”

“Hide it where?” Goldie asked. “Hide it from who? We're out in the middle of Touhoku. All there is around here are me, the bears and the trout.”

Happosai cackled. Soun clapped Goldie on the shoulder.

“How's about something to eat?” Genma asked. “We haven't eaten for days now.”

“What, do I look like, somebody who runs a hotel?” Goldie asked.

“Oh, come on, man! We'll pay ya back by doing whatever you ask,” Happosai said.

“Within reason, of course,” Soun added and Genma nodded.

That was what Goldie needed to know. The old man was in charge, but the younger two men were close friends and, push come to shove, they might stick together against the oldster.

 _Thank the Powers for sending the Three Fates to_ _warn_ _me_ , Goldie thought. _That_ _gives_ _me an edge on these hard cases._

“Yeah, okay,” Goldie said with a rueful grin. “Ya got me. I'm a professional cook _and_ fair dinkum miner. Go unload the rickshaw into this shed. Then I'll whip ya up somethin' ta eat.”

And so they did -- very eagerly. Goldie had not cooked for anyone but himself for almost a decade and the vile trio had not eaten anything that they could not catch or find while on the run for over a week. It was a joy for him to cook for others once again, even though one of the three might well try to murder him.

The three toughs were indeed hard men, but they were not invincible. All three of them promptly fell asleep after they had stuffed themselves full of the tasty food that Goldie had cooked. While they slept, Goldie schemed.

 _I may as well get some_ _hard yakka_ _done while these three_ _hoons_ _are here,_ he thought. _I'll put the two younger ones to work on the arrastra and I'll show the old man the collapsed adit. He's small enough to find a way through it. Once he has threaded his way into the mine, he'll see all that electrum and he won't want to work on anything else. That means I -- or we -- will be able to collapse the adit completely while he's in the mine. He'll be sealed in there or dead. Well, being sealed into a mine is as good as being dead if no one digs back into rescue you. He'll die in the dark the way he deserves, if what the Fates told me is true._ _Besides, he's the most dangerous one of the three and he is the one most likely to become my murderer. If I play my cards right, I might even survive this and get to enjoy my wealth._

About noon the next day, the trio of evil woke. Each of them had to stay in the privy for a prolonged period upon waking. That was all right with Goldie. The electrum was going nowhere and there was plenty of time for all of them to work. This meant that the bandits would be wholly dependent on what Goldie knew about mining to dig up the ore and process it. Goldie resisted the urge to rub his hands with gleeful greed.

“Gonna get lotsa pay-dirt outta this bunch,” he muttered under his breath. He had gone hunting and had shot a deer while his evil companions were asleep. He had fresh venison and biscuits cooking on the ramshackle stove. It smelled wonderful, even to Goldie who had stopped eating venison years ago.

“ _Oh, we are going to dig up so much gold!”_ he exclaimed in English. _“It's gonna be wonderful.”_

“ _What's going to be wonderful?”_ Happosai asked in lightly accented Dutch. _“The food -- which smells very tasty -- or something else?”_

“You speak Dutch and you at least understand English?” Goldie asked in English. He was startled by the old man's knowledge of languages other than Japanese.

“I understand English, but I can speak Dutch better,” Happosai answered in Dutch. “You can speak Japanese, but your aren't really comfortable with it, even after all these years.”

“How do you know I've been here all that long?” Goldie asked in his heavily accented Japanese.

“Because all the physical signs, you fool! This place reeks of your presence. You've been here for decades. Don't try to shitcher Uncle Knowledgeable, Ouzii-san.”

“Goldie.”

“What?”

“My name is Goldie, the cook. That's what everyone has called me since I was fourteen. You may as well do the same.”

Happosai gave Goldie a cunning stare as he spoke.

“All right, Goldie it is then. They call me Happosai.”

Goldie nodded his head. “Happosai, means 'eight treasures', doesn't it?”

“So it does and your name means treasure as well, doesn't it?”

Goldie nodded his head as he answered. “True, but mainly that's about my hair color.”

“How much to you know about diggin' gold or mining in general?” Happosai asked.

“Been working mines practically all my life,” Goldie answered. “Both as a cook and as a miner. I know everything you need to do to get any kind of ore out of the ground.”

“Yeah? So what is this place exactly? Why has it got so much of this gold-silver alloy in it?”

“This particular claim is what those in the minin' business call a quartz storm. It's just a tangle of faults filled with quartzite with little organization to it. The veins run in practically every direction and they cross through one another.”

“Okay, but why electrum?”

“Don't know. I doubt anyone else does either. Electrum is one of the rarer finds.”

“You know anything about Sado Island?”

“Yeah, it's the only other great gold find in Japan from what I heard. It's not producing like it was.”

“Is it one of these 'quartz storms' or is it something else?”

“Don't know. Haven't seen it.”

“Well, at least your honest,” Happosai said. “So we're standin' in the middle of a quartz storm are we? Funny name for a bunch of rocks.”

“It is until you learn to think like a prospector,” Goldie said. “Once you've done that, it all makes sense.”

Happosai made an odd motion with his arms, not realizing that Goldie noticed the motion, then without warning, both Soun and Genma appeared as though they had popped up out of the ground. Goldie assumed that they had been standing in plain sight somehwere nearby, but he was damned if could tell you where they were before they became visible.

Goldie maintained his bearing and led the bandits around the dead merchant's find showing them where everything was and how it worked. He left the collapsed adit to the very last thing he showed them.

“And this is where the absolutely richist vein is, but the adit is collapsed. There just ain't enough of us to open and make it safe, so we are going to harvest the electrum that is safe for us to dig.”

“Ain't that gonna take a lot more work and time?” Happosai asked.

“Yeah, it'll be a bit 'o hard yakka I reckon, but as you can see from this adit there is no way to reach all that glorius ore, Happosai. It's too dangerous for the four of us to try stiping back in.”

“What does 'stiping' mean?” Soun asked.

“It means re-opening a collapsed tunnel and bracing it as you go back in. It's difficulty is different with every situation, but this one here is nigh onto impossible for any crew less than ten men,” Goldie said. “I tried to explain that to this mine's original owner and he didn't listen -- hell -- he didn't want to hear it. That's why this adit collapsed while he was in it.”

“You mean there's a dead man in there?” Genma asked.

“More than one,” Goldie said. “There were at least six of them in there workin' when it collapsed.”

“You sure that there's no way to crawl through it?” Happosai asked.

“Well, probably not, at least not for a big man,” Goldie said in a hopeful voice, “but a small man might find a way to crawl through.”

“Okay, let's go look at what you have in mind to dig, then,” Happosai said in a hearty voice. “This here electrum ain't gonna dig itself up and time is short at our age.”

Goldie and Happosai had a hearty laugh together, then Goldie led the three bandits to a place where he had been digging.

“This ore here is very rich,” Goldie said, “not as rich as the ore deep underground, but it's just about as rich as I have seen for surface mining.”

Soun bent down and picked up a piece of mottled quartzite and he began to shake. Goldie watched with amusement as Genma walked over to Soun and looked at the same rock. Happosai, being the perceptive little beast that he was, did not have to see the rock to know that it bore visible electrum.

“Mmm, gonna hafta watch those two,” Happosai muttered under his breath, not realizing that Goldie had overheard and understood him.

“We'll put these two strapping healthy men to work on the arrastra whilst you and I sluice and pan the ore,” Goldie said. “Deal?”

“Okay, but I wanna see what all this sluicing and panning are like before I agree to _anything_ ,” Happosai said.

“Good! I already have some flour ready to sluice,” Goldie said in his hale and hearty voice as he clapped Happosai on the shoulder. Goldie's hand was huge and hard so he was surprised by how hard Happosai was. The tiny old fart felt more like a man in his prime years than he did like an octogenarian. “But lemme show these boys how to work the arrastra first.”

Happosai was upset about being touched in such a familiar way, but Goldie noticed that he managed to keep his protests confined to a sharp a brief severe glance. Goldie was impressed. He had already learned how finicky the Japanese were about public displays of affection, even the casual manly displays, like being slapped on the shoulder. Goldie had clapped down on his potential murderer pretty hard. The little man's reaction was very well contained, which told Goldie that the old fart was indeed very dangerous.

 

* * *

 

Four weeks later, Happosai's patience was beginning to wear thin. He hated Goldie. The tall Aussie disgusted him and he did not think that Soun liked the man either, but Genma seemed completely indifferent to Goldie. Genma was completely focused on getting as much ore ground as quickly as he and Soun could operate the arrastra. Thanks to his efforts, they now had far more to pan and sluice than they could hope to do for another month.

Happosai hated panning and he hated sluicing even more. The water was cold, both processes demanded way too much patience of him and on top of that, he got soaked to his skin with freezing ass water every time he worked at it. On the other hand, he had to admit, getting gold and silver out of the deal was hard to argue against. Happosai had never worked so hard in all his life, save perhaps when he first started learning the martial arts, but the art was not a labor for him. It was a thing he loved and could do all day without complaint.

Unfortunately, the art did not pay very well at all and it certainly had not done anything to make his ugly little ass more attractive to the pretty young women. Happosai's entire life was a tale of woe and frustration. He could never get what he really wanted. His evil little brain worked double time while he panned the flour for tiny flakes of electrum.

 _Gotta do sumthin_ _'_ _about Soun and Genma,_ Happosai thought. _They are more loyal to each other than either of them is loyal to me. Course, I can't really blame 'em for not liking me. I haven't shown them any real kindness the entire time they been runnin' with me, but dammit all, I have become to used to 'em bein' at my beck and call._ _On top of that, they know me entirely too well. It's time for a refresh. Gotta get rid of 'em._

“Damn this fucking cold water!” Happosai shouted. He was wet from his solar plexus to his toes. “It's freezin' me ta death!”

“So, go change into some dry clothes and stand by the fire for a little while,” Goldie said with a pleased grin. “Then you can come back to work. We're getting so much metal that it's not funny.”

“I hafta agree with ya, Goldie,” Happosai said, then spat on the ground, “this shit ain't funny. There's nuthin' fun about it.”

Having said that, Happosai dropped his pan and headed for the shack and its warm stove.

Goldie watched the diminutive imp's back and shook his head.

 _He's getting less patient every day,_ Goldie thought. _He'll make his move soon. I have to be ready for him,_ _but I dare not make a move until he demands to see what's inside that adit._

Soun and Genma were shoveling flour out of the arrastra when Happosai stalked away from the panning and sluicing area of their operation. Genma stopped in middle of a throw to watch his old master stamp toward the shed. After Happosai disappeared inside, he threw the last shovel full of flour into the cart. Soun was already standing by the ore cart, waiting for Genma to clamber out of the arrastra pit.

Genma asked Soun as he took his place beside Soun and they began to push the cart toward the place that Goldie had set up for panning and sluicing, “How much do we have now, do you think?”

“Mmph, sixty kilograms or so,” Soun replied in a mumble. Whispering carried further than mumbling. Soun knew that from experience.

“I thought as much,” Genma mumbled. “Master's just about out of patience.”

“Yes, that doesn't bode well, does it?” Soun mumbled back.

“I don't think that the old fart intends to share anything with Goldie, do you?” Genma mumbled.

“I don't think that Goldie has any intention of sharing with us, either,” Soun mumbled.

“I think that Master will do for Goldie,” Genma mumbled.

“I agree,” Soun mumbled, “I also believe that he will try to do something to us, soon.”

“Nah,” Genma said in a very soft voice. “He'll need our help to get the metal back to civilization. There is too much of it for him to carry alone. He'll use us for pack animals.”

Soun nodded his head. “And once that's done, then he'll try to do us in.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Genma mumbled.

“So what are you thinking, old friend?”

“I'm thinking that we should wait until the old man does Goldie in, _then_ make our move.”

“Yes, again I agree, but what do we do?” Soun mumbled. The Master's skill is far greater than ours.”

“So, we surprise him with something nasty,” Genma said. “I've already planted a keg of powder in that old adit.”

Soun stared at Genma in surprise. “Why?”

“Because I guessed that the men in that mine did not die immediately,” Genma mumbled, “and I was right. They had almost dug their way out before they ran out of air.”

“So you think that if someone had been on the outside digging in, they would be alive now.”

“Yes,” Genma mumbled. “as it is, though, I broke a hole through into the mine that I can just barely fit through. It'll look like a highway to the master.”

“Whatever gave you the idea of doing such a thing, Saotome?”

“Goldie did,” Genma mumbled. “He's been doing the same thing.”

“Does Goldie know that you've been digging in there?”

“Nope,” Genma said. “I have been very careful to avoid him and I only did just enough to help him finish a little faster.”

“That is so very sneaky of you, Saotome,” Soun mumbled.

“Yeah, well, you know the master as well as I do,” Genma mumbled back. “D'ya expect him to do right by us?”

“No, I don't, Saotome,” Soun mumbled. “He is bound to have noticed that we work together because we are loyal to each other, but we only do what he tells us to do.”

“So what would you do in his sandals?” Genma asked.

“I'd do exactly what you are predicting that he'll do,” Soun said. “Did you bring the fuse out where we can light it?”

“Yes,” Genma said. “I'm thinking that the old man will do Goldie in once we have a hundred kilograms to carry off.”

“Mmm, forty for you and me and twenty for him,” Soun said, “then, once we are back where there is something to buy with it, he'll kill us.”

“Something close to that, I think, Nakahara,” Genma mumbled.

“Say, one a you boys wanna have a go at pannin'?” Goldie shouted. “I think Happosai's done for the day.”

“Go ahead, Nakahara,” Genma mumbled, “We're nearly out of raw ore anyway. I'll do some more digging while you help him pan.”

Soun nodded his head and shouted back, “Sure thing, Goldie. I'll be right there.”

Soun walked over to Goldie and Goldie gave him a brief run through on how to pan gold. I turned out that Soun had a definite talent for panning which Happosai lacked. Happosai trotted out and saw how well Soun was doing and became upset.

“Yeah, well, yer okay at panning, but I can do sumthin' you can't!” Happosai shouted. He hopped back over to where they had been using picks and shovels to dig out the electrum bearing quatzite and then said to Genma, “Gicher fat ass outta my way, Genma.”

Genma dropped the pick he was using and started trying to climbu up out of the trench that he had been digging in and Happosai shouted, “Don't leave that damned pick there, take it with you. It'll be in my way!”

So, Genma grabbed the pick and climbed out of the trench.

“Stand back, Fatboy,” Happosai said, as he leapt up high into the air. “This is gonna be messy.”

Genma's face took on the look of a deeply alarmed man as Happosai descended into the trench. He turned and started running just as the diminutive old fart landed in the bottom of the trench. He had his right forefinger stuck out in front of him. As soon as his fingertip touched the quartzite, it exploded into thousands of tiny fragments that rose into the air like thousands of angry hornets.

Genma found himself gagging on the high silica dust and ducking the sharp cornered bits of quartzite that whizzed by him. He was not at all surprised by Happosai's stunt. He had seen the old fart kill a raging bull with the same technique.

Little wonder he can shatter rock with his finger tip, Genma thought.

“Damn, Happosai!” Genma shouted, “How do you do that?”

“It's a handy trick I learned from the Amazons of China,” Happosai said with a laugh. “You'd better get way back. There's gonna be a lot more flying rock.”

Genma turned and ran for his life as the impish little thief proceeded to blast the quartzite repeatedly, extending and deepening the trench in a dramatic fashion. The dust and shrapnel got so bad so fast that even Soun and Goldie had to seek shelter in the cook shack and they were a hundred meters away from the ore trench.

Goldie, Soun and Genma all tried to get out of Happosai's furious dust storm by hiding behind the walls of the cook shack, but the crude kitchen was only able to block out the tiny bits of flying quartzite, it was entirely too loosely built to deter the dust. The three of them stood around for the next fifteen minutes gagging and coughing. Pretty soon the flying quartzit that sounded like hail as it pummeled the tin roof and siding, stopped. The dust still lingered, but the flying gravel stopped hammering the tin walls

Suddenly, the door flew open and Happosai strutted into the shack.

“There, now we have some ore to work with,” Happosai said. His head and chest were both swollen as he strutted around the place. “I happen to have a very intimate understanding of what rock is and how to deal with it, and I don't need no stinking tools to do that.”

Goldie chewed at his lip. “So, you're a human jack hammer. You shudda said sumthin' sooner, mate. It'd uv saved us a lotta hard yakka.”

Happosai's only reply was to increase the arrogance of his strut. He was twice as proud as any banty rooster the world had ever seen.

“I'm surprised that he hasn't crowed by now, ain't you, mates?” Goldie asked the silent Soun and Genma. “He's a cocky lil' shit, ain't he?”

Genma immediately stepped in close to Goldie and growled. “Be careful of what you say, Ouzii-san”

Goldies eyes widened with shock as Soun stepped in to one side of Goldie. “We're on very thin ice here, Godie-san. Be careful -- very careful.”

Goldie held up both of his hands. “Just kiddin', mates. Just tryin' to joke around a bit.”

“Why don't we go outside and see if Happosai was joking,” Soun said. “I think then you'll understand our caution.”

Goldie, Soun and Genma then went out to see what Happosai had done.

“Good god!” Goldie exclaimed in English. He did that everytime he was frightened or impressed. “Wudja lookit that!”

Happosai had extended and deepened the trench in the quartzite vain by several meters. It was now full of quartzite gravel, that glittered in the sun.

“Impressive,” Soun said.

“Most impressive,” Genma said.

Happosai came strutting out to them and all three men turned to stare at the proud Imp of Evil.

“Well, mate, seein as how ye can do this, why don't we have another look at what's in the old adit?” Goldie asked.

“Sure,” Happosai said. Let's go have a look right now. You two start panning. We'll be back in an hour or so.”

Genma and Soun nodded their heads as Goldie and Happosai walked down the hill to the old mine entrance.

As they were walking over to the panning stations, Soun mumbled, “Now, maybe?”

“No, he hasn't done for Goldie, yet,” Genma mumbled. “We need to wait for that to happen.”

“Why?” Soun asked.

“Karma,” Genma said.

Soun grunted in agreement.

They started panning right after Soun showed Genma the technique. As it turned out, Genma was good at it as well, and might even have been slightly faster than Soun was.

“Have you seen what's in the mine?” Soun mumbled

“Yes, the ore in there is far richer than what we've been digging up here.”  
“So why not re-open the damn thing?” Soun asked.

“We won't be able to carry that much electrum back to civilization, Nakahara,” Genma replied. “We have to deal with the situation we have at hand and it's not good.”

Soun grunted his agreement, and kept right on working. An hour went by, then another and another. After three hours had passed, Goldie returned with a hypnotized Happosai close behind him. Happosai's eyes were as big as dinner plates and he had a large piece of quartzite in each hand. The large lumps were actually more electrum than the were quartzite.

“Can you believe this shit?” Happosai asked. “I don't know why we were mucking around with the cheesy shit up here.”

A wave of annoyance followed by a wave of disgust ran across Goldie's face. “It's like this, mate. We dig around in there the whole bloody thing will fall on us.”

“You don't know that!” Happosai shouted.

Soun and Genma did not get involved in this argument. They had plans of their own.

“Oh, don't be a greedy fool!” Goldie shouted back. “There's plenty of pay-dirt up here on the surface, and there is not enough of us to re-open that shaft.”

Happosai understood, but he did not like what he had just heard. “So how many men do we need then?”

“A dozen at least,” Goldie said. “But then I'd hafta spend nearly all day cooking to feed that many.”

“And you're the nearest thing we have to a real miner, eh?” Happosai asked.

“Yeah, somethin' like 'at,” Goldie said.

“I can fix that,” Happosai said. “Come on, boys. We're going down to the nearest village.”

This rattled Genma and Soun alike.

“Forget about it, mate,” Goldie interjected. “None of the villagers will even come near this place. The local priest has declared it taboo or somethin'.”

“He did?” Happosai nearly shrieked. “Why?”

“Because nearly half of the men old enough to get any real work done died in this mine,” Goldie said. “Half of 'em died in that last cave in.”

Happosai sneered. “So? Have you ever lived in country village?”

“More than one,” Goldie said, his face turning pink.

“Then you gotta know that bein' a villager ain't really a good way to live!” Happosai shouted.

“Livin' in a village is a damn sight better than dying in a mine, you hoon!” Goldie shouted back. He bent over as he shouted nearly touching his nose to Happosai's nose.

Genma saw Happosai grit his teeth and quiver with fury and decided to step in. “Now, Happosai, staying alive is what _we_ are all about.”

Soun hurridley backed Genma. “Yes, Happosai, we all struggle to live. Why would we want to drag villagers into this?”

“Yes, the fewer people involved, the more money for us,” Genma said.

Happosai did not need any more convincing, he cooled off. “So, you boys gonna dig all the ore?”

“Yes,” Soun and Genma said in chorus.

“Then you'll hafta do the panning and sluicing as well,” Happosai said. “I'm too old to suffer all that chilly water and so is Goldie.”

Genma pulled a long face and Soun simply stared at Happosai in silence.

“I ain't kiddin'!” Happoai shouted. “You two boys are at least two centuries younger than me and you're several decades younger than Goldie. Me and him will scare up the grub and cook it, and we'll even do the cleanin'. All you hafta ta do is the minin'.”

Genma kept his long face and Soun gave out an audible sigh.

“Come on, it won't be for more than a couple of weeks,” Happosai said.

“All right, deal, but we'll split the electrum evenly between the four of us,” Genma said after a long pause.

“And Goldie must do all the cooking,” Soun said. “Your cooking isn't all that special.”

Happosai threw a look at Goldie. Goldie nodded his head with a big smile. Happosai turned his eyes back on his two “students” and said, “All right, you have a deal. Me and Goldie will do the grub and the cleanin' and you two do the minin'. Once you've done enough, we'll split up the electrum four ways even and leave here in peace.”

Genma stuck out his hand and shouted, “May the Gods bear witness!”

Soun covered Ganma's hand with his own then Goldie covered Soun's and finally, Happosai put his hand in. “May the Gods witness!” The four men shouted together. Then, they all had a hardy laugh and went to work on the tasks that they had agreed to do. Each of them had treachery in their hearts, but each of them felt safe knowing that their plans were secret from the others.

Over the next two weeks many things happened. Soun and Genma panned the remaining ground quartzite and garnered another twenty kilograms of electrum. Haposai and Goldie repaired the roof on the old bunkhouse so that they would have more heated space to sleep in. Goldie and Happosai also went into a nearby village and had additional clothing made for all of them. This was a very surprising boon for both Soun and Genma. They had been doing the roughest work and their clothing was rapidly worn into tatters.

The evil things that went on happened during the night, while everyone was supposedly sleeping. Happosai made a nightly trip into the old adit to extract more rich ore. He stashed it where he thought that the others would not notice, but Genma spotted him using a technique that he never told anyone about. Goldie, would sleep like a log, and Soun sought out his stash of electrum dust and nuggets while he was sleeping. But then, even Goldie did something evil, he planted a stick of dynamite in the adit, hoping to get all three of them inside the old mine at once. Unfortunately for Goldie, it did not work out that way. Happosai found it in the middle of the sixth week.

He strutted into the bunk house and used a shiatsu technique on Goldie to keep him asleep, then dragged him outside. Once they were well out of earshot, he used shiatsu again, this time to inflict pain on the old gaijin.

“Yeow! Wotya do that for, mate?”

“Did you put this thing in the adit?” Happosai's voice was low and menacing.

Goldie gulped and worked his mouth as though he were a fish out of water.

“I thought so, you bastard!” Happosai's voice hissed as though he were a snake. Then he poked Goldien on the sternum and the old man started gasping for air, unable to breath. He started turning blue, then he turned purple, then blood came out of his mouth and nose.

“Well, looks like you had a stroke, Goldie,” Happosai said with a hearty laugh. “Serves you right you gaijin bastard.”  
Happosai cackled as the light in Goldie's eyes faded and his dead body collapsed. Happosai was still cackling as he made his way back into the bunkhouse. He got a stout canvas bag and sneaked back down to the adit. He never had a clue that Genma had watched everything that he had done thing.

As Happosai entered the adit, Genma sneaked along behind him using the technique that he had developed on his own. Not even the hyper-aware Happosai detected him. He sat down and took up a lotus position in front of the adit with his hands cupped around each ear. He could hear every sound the evil imp made as he crawled over the tumbled drift that nearly filled the adit. Once he was certain that the Happosai was past the powder keg he had planted he reached for the fuse that he had prepared, but Soun was already holding the end of it.

“You managed to sneak up on me, Nakahara,” Genma mumbled.

“So I see,” Soun mumbled. “You forgot that I am accomplished at moving quietly, did you not?”

 _No, I didn't, but I also know that you cannot remain silent and invisible the way I can,_ Genma thought. _Unfortunately, I lost my concentration and you spotted me._

“He's deep inside now, well past the barrel of powder I planted.”

“You're certain that he has not noticed it or the fuse?”

“I ran the fuse inside a piece of small bore pipe and buried it. Happosai will never see or even smell it burning.”

“Good,” Soun said and then struck a spark with his handy flint. The fuse begain to burn and smoke. “You had better move to one side. Can't be certain of what might fly out of that opening.”

The two of them hastily scrambled to one side of the adit and waited. It did not take long until there was a muffled bang, followed by what seemed like the entire mountain shaking and the side of loose rock sliding about. A cloud of dust shot out of the adit accompanied by small bits of whizzing rock, then silence.

Genma and Soun waited until the dust settled. Both of them strained to hear any noises coming out of the badly damaged mine. They hear nothing. Once they were certain that Happosai was sealed in, they began to dance in a circle. Hugely grateful to be alive and well shut of the evil old imp that they had accompanied on many an evil adventure.

“We're free!” Soun shouted.

“Sure are, Nakahara,” Genma said, clapping his life long friend on the shoulder. “Let's go get some sleep. We gotta lot to do in the morning.”

“Indeed we do, Saotome,” Soun said happily. “Indeed we do.”

As they were walking back toward the bunk house, they found Goldie.'

“We should give him a decent burial,” Soun said. “He deserves it.”

“Yes, he spent his entire life digging for gold and we're taking it,” Ganma said. “It's the least we can do.”

They then found a patch of soil and dug a grave for Goldie. Soun had wrapped Goldie up in a canvas tarp while Genma dug. They could not dig a deep grave. The soil was shallow with sold rock about a meter deep. Genma helped Soun to gently lower Goldie's body into his final resting place. They did this with reverance, realizing that Goldie had made them wealthy.

“I apologize to you, you old western oni,” Soun said. “Thanks to you, Geman and I will never have to labor ever again.”

“Mmmph!” Genma grunted his agreement. “Unless we find something that we want to do, anyway.”

After they had backfilled Goldies grave, Soun said, “I don't know anything about a Christian burial, do you?”

“No, I don't,” Genma said in his grinding voice. “Probably best for us to leave that between him and his Gods.”

Soun heaved a sigh. “I think you're right, Saotome. Best to leave matters as they stand.”

“We'll pay for this eventually,” Genma said.

“This and a great deal more, Saotome,” Soun said with a faint glint of tear in one eye. “But Goldie was one of the western oni, though not a very bad one. I won't feel any guilt over this.”

Genma grinned. “I could say that about more than one man that I would like to see buried.”

“We've buried two men tonight,” Soun said. “One of them is probably still alive.”

Genma gave out a howling laugh. “I wish I could see that old bastard's face about now, don't you?”

Soun gave Genma a heartfelt grin. “Ineed I do, Saotome. It is a rare thing for Happosai to fall into an abject panic.”

“Let's go get some sleep,” Genma said, “we've got several days of hard work ahead of us.”

“I have a suprise for you, Saotome,” Soun said as they walked toward the bunkhouse.

“Yeah, what might that be?” Genma asked.

“Goldie had more than one rickshaw,” Soun said.

“Aw, that smaller one is a mess,” Genma said. “It's unusable.”

“No, I fixed it,” Soun said, “we're going to be able to haul of our ill-gotten gains back to civilization.”

The two of them clapped their hands and danced with glee.

 

* * *

 

Deep in the mine, Happosai was not panicking the way his two students imagined him to be doing.

“I'll be damned,” Happosai said aloud. “Those two finally grew balls. I really and truly did not expect that.”

He then put out his carbide head lamp and took up a lotus position.

“I'll hafta meditate for a while,” Happosai said in a whisper. “I'll see you two boys in a few years.”

 

* * *

 

 

Three days later, Soun and Genma stood up a huge flat boulder up in a way that blocked the adit completely. While Soun used a cold chisel to carve the kanji for bean _(beans are thrown about in the month of February by the Japanese to ward off demons)_ into the face of the rock. Genma made up a shimenawa _(_ _rope_ _made of plaited_ _straw_ _)_ , and even some folded paper up into shime _(white paper folded up to represent lightning)_ to adorn it. Believing that they had finally sealed away their personal demon, they merrily set about panning out the last of the powdered ore thay had on hand. Loaded all of the panned electrum onto the two rickshaws and departed a week later. They never heard a peep from Happosai.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was edited to change Tendo to Nakahara. My apologies, but I am so accustomed of thinking about Soun with the last name Tendo that I screwed up.


	4. A Time of Increasing Wa

Genma and Soun arrived in northern Tokyo in three short weeks. It was an adventurous three weeks, but they managed to get themselves and their treasure into Nerima in short order. Once there, Soun looked up Tendo Akiko.

He had no intention of asking her to marry him. Her father was a banker and Soun wanted his advice, the only problem was that he had never actually met Akiko's father. His plan was a desperate stab in the dark.

He and Genma needed help unloading their ill-gotten electrum. He was not about to tell Akiko's daddy how they had gotten their hands on the valuable metal. That was strictly need to know. All old man Tendo needed to know is that they had it for sale, preferably to the highest possible bidder, but finding such a bidder posed a difficult problem that neither he nor Genma were equipped to solve.

“Ohayou, Tendo-san,” Soun said with a quick bow to Tendo Akiko.

She was just returning to her home after a naginata tournament. Her hair was in disarray and she smelled to high heaven. That only served to excite Nakahara Soun. He liked feisty women.

Akiko rewarded Soun with a sunny smile despite her appearance. She was truly happy to see him.

“Ohayou, Nakahara-san,” Akiko said. “Long time, no see. Where have you been and what have you been doing?”

Soun had a brief coughing fit. “I...ah...well I've been out exploring Touhoku,” Soun said. “I would like to speak with your father, if he could make some time to talk to me.”

Akiko gave him another smile. This one was rather shy. “What do you want to speak with him about?”

“Well...a friend of mine and I found something that we believe to be valuable, but we do not know who to talk to. I need your father's advice on this matter.”

“Valuable, you say? What is it?”

This nonplussed Soun. “Well -- er -- it's...well, itsa, itsa, a valuable metallic alloy -- I think.”

“How much of this alloy did you find?”

“Ahem, about four hundred kilograms.”

“I'll ask him,” Akiko said. “He's terribly busy. He could not come to my tournament today, but I'll ask provided you promise me one thing.”

“Name it.” Soun was immensely pleased both because she agreed to get an appointment for him and that she had not asked about the nature of the alloy he had gotten.

“Meet me for luncheon tomorrow.”

That was one of the problems Soun had. He was hurting for cash. Coffeehouses and restaurants were disinclined to take electrum as payment. “Ah, well -- Hehe ...”

“Don't worry, Nakahara-san,” Akiko said, “My treat.”

“Well, that would be no problem then,” Soun said with genuine gratitude in his voice.

“But then you must also agree to spar with me,” Akiko said. “I don't do _anything_ for nothing.”

“Deal!” Soun shouted.

“Noon tomorrow then?”

“Sure, where shall we meet?”

“That restaurant right over there,” Akiko said pointing at a nearby establishment that was very upscale.

The restaurant made Soun nervous, but he had no other choice. “All right, I'll be right outside waiting on you before noon tomorrow.”

This made Akiko to smile very brightly. “I'll see you tomorrow, then. Bye.”

With that she hefted both her practice naginata and her family heirloom, a real naginata made for actual battle, onto her right shoulder and her heavy bag of protective equipment slung over her left shoulder and walked up the street looking jaunty despite her burdens.

Soun stood there watching her departing back until Genma placed a hand on his shoulder, giving him a start.

“Wah -- Oh, it's you,” Soun said.

“What did she say?” Genma asked.

“We made a deal,” Soun said. “She said she would try to get an appointment for me with her father, provided I meet her at noon at that restaurant over there.”

“Mmph! That's a very nice place.”

“Yes, too nice, but she offered to pick up the tab.”

“She did?” Genma looked deeply impressed. “She must like you, Nakahara-kun.”

“She also insisted that I spar with her.”

“Spar, huh? What's her specialty.”

“Naginata.”

“Go easy on her, then.”

“I can't. She's too good. She beat me three times out of five the last time we sparred.”

Genma laughed and slapped Soun on his back. “Well, in that case, you need to do your best.”

“This is going to be difficult, Genma.”

“Why is that?”

“Tendo is a banker and I don't have so much as a single personal card.”

“Oh, I've already got that handled.”

Soun did a double take. “How?”

“I managed to pick up this little gemgack.”

Soun looked at what was in Genma's hand and it was a small box made out of ivory with jade inlay that formed the symbol for heaven.

“How did you come by that?” Soun asked in an alarmed voice.

“Shh, don't ask,” Genma said. “You should know better than to look a gift horse in the mouth by now.”

“I do, Saotome, but I worry about me showing up in these rags and presenting Tendo Takuma with something as elegant as that box. It will make him suspicious.”

“The man's a banker, right?”

“Yes, so?”

“So, he's used to people bringing him valuable objects. Besides, all it will do is to trigger his greed. He'll take it and without batting an eye.”

“You certainly have a low opinion of people, Saotome.”

“I know what to expect from them, Nakahara-kun. Unlike you, I have moved in some very powerful circles. They're all greedy, right down the very last man.”

“You're certain?”

“As certain as I can be at this point. The girl's father has had seven girls, right?

“Yes. Akiko is the youngest.”

“And she's still at home, right?”

“Yes, so?”

“So he's obliged to find her a husband, you idiot.”

All Soun could do was to stare at Genma with his jaw sagging and a blush creeping up his neck and past his hairline.

“Nakahara-kun, you astound me every now and again. The girl obviously likes you or she wouldn't have agreed to get you an appointment with her daddy.”

Soun stammered, hemmed and hawed.

“Oh, don't be so silly, Nakahara-kun. You're a shoo-in.”

“I never...even...”

“Well, don't worry, my old friend,” Genma said with a laugh. “You can bet your ass and all its fittings that she has.”

“What makes you say that?” Soun all but shouted.

“I was watching the two of you together,” Genma said. “She is really taken with you. You must've really impressed her during that tournament.”

“But that was so long ago...I...”

“You worry too much, Nakahara-kun,” Genma said. “Women have this thing called a biological clock. You can bet that Tendo Akiko hears hers ticking. She's husband high and she knows it. So does her father. Open this.”

Soun opened the small box and saw that there were several of their best electrum nuggets in it.

“Oh.” Was all Nakahara Soun could say.

“And that will be her father's reaction as well.”

“He'll want to know where these came from, you know.”

“Sure he will, so just tell him as much truth as is decent,” Genma said. “He doesn't need to know the details and I'll give you even odds that he'll never ask for 'em.”

“Where do I say we got this stuff?” Soun asked. “I don't even know the name of that old mine.”

“That's right, we never asked, did we? Just tell him that it came from a creek the highest reaches of Touhoku.”

“That is very near the truth, isn't it, Saotome-kun.”

“Sure is. He'll buy that story, I'm sure.”

“Do you want me to mention you?”

“Could you have hauled as much as we have back on your own?”

“No.”

“Then tell him that I helped,” Genma said. “I'm not worried about you. You're the most honest man I have ever dealt with.”

“I'm a murderer and a thief, just like you.”

“That's what reassures me,” Genma said. “You've done all that but you're still honest. You have never let me down. Your word is your bond so I'm willing to give you mine.”

Soun looked deeply embarrassed.

“Stop worrying already!” Genma said. “Just meet the Tendo girl tomorrow and be friendly with her.”

They walked back to the remote shed where they had parked the two rickshaws, only to find a small group of thugs going over them. They did not have guns, but all of them were armed with a knife or a club of some kind. One of them was even had an antique iron claw on the end of his left arm. He also had an Arkansas toothpick in his belt.

 _He got a hold of an American knife somehow,_ Soun thought. _Too bad he won't live past today._

One of them spotted Soun and Genma and called his boss's attention to them. The leader of the punks was tall and mean looking and he walked with a braggart's strut. Soun never broke his pace, but walked right up to the twenty-something and stood well inside the punk's striking range. The punk put his right hand on the hilt of his fourteenth century kodachi. Soun judged it to be roughly fifteen sun in length _(18 inches)_. He was completely unfazed by this.

 _I'll take that off this guy's dead body,_ Soun thought. _It looks to be a very valuable weapon._

“Who're you?” The punk demanded to know.

“I happen to own one of those rickshaw's you and your friends are pawing over,” Soun said in the mildest tone he could muster. “Are you quite done? I'd like to move my property now.”

“It ain't yours anymore, you silly fuckhead,” the punk replied. “Go away before I gut-cha like a fish.”

“Oh, my!” Soun exclaimed. “You're going to cut my belly open? With that kodachi?”

“What do ya think ya lanky fool?” The punk asked with an insolent sneer. “Do I look like a liar to you?”

“Yes, you do,” Soun said in a voice so smooth and mild that he could barely be heard. “Not only that, I think you are strictly a bluffer and a crass bully.”

The punk said nothing but whipped the kodachi out of its sheath and tried to nail Soun with an overhand stab, which is the very worst way you can attack a trained man.

Soun blocked the punk's strike easily and then broke both of his legs as though they were mere matchsticks -- multiple times. The punk went down screaming in pain. Genma suddenly appeared behind the punk's buddies like a silent tornado, killing them all very quickly. All of them save their leader lay on the ground and were very, very still.

The leader was still thrashing around and screaming in agony.

“Finish him off, won't you, Nakahara-kun,” Genma said in his grinding voice. “He's gonna attract attention that we don't want.”

Soun regarded the howling punk carefully, then kicked him in the neck, killing him instantly.

Genma smiled and said, “That's more like it. We need to hurry now.”

Soun took in a deep breath. “Let's make certain that these thieves didn't pocket any of our metal, Saotome-kun.”

Sure enough, two of the dead boys had bulging pockets and they were full to the point of bursting with electrum nuggets. That obliged Genma and Soun to check the rest. All of them had at least a few nuggets in their clothing.

“What'll we do with these bodies, Saotome-kun?”

“I happen to know where their boss hides,” Genma said. “We'll dump 'em on his doorstep.”

“In broad daylight?” Soun asked in an alarmed voice.

“Of course not,” Genma said. “That would make people talk. We'll do it about midnight tonight.”

“Okay, so what do we do with them between now and then?”

“We'll stash 'em under the floor of that old house over there,” Genma said pointing to a nearby dilapidated home. “I don't think anyone has lived in that old thing since before the war in Korea started.”

Soun merely grunted and picked up the leader of the punks and hefted his limp body over his left shoulder, then he grabbed one of the smaller dead minions by his belt and started dragging him towards the rundown shack. Genma followed with two more. They had all the bodies hidden in minutes.

After they were done, Soun sat down heavily beside the larger rickshaw with his back to its wheel. Then he buried his face in both his palms.

“Yet more bad karma, Saotome-kun,” Soun said in a bitter voice that was muffled by his hands. “Will it never end?”

“Oh, do go on, Nakahara-kun,” Genma said. “We just did the entire city a favor by killing these thugs. They're Yakuza, for crying out loud. Didn'ya see their tattoos?”

“No, I didn't,” Soun said. “I was too busy lusting after that guy's kodachi.”

Genma picked the kodachi up and whistled. “Oo-la-la! thirteenth or fourteenth century yet. Gotta give that punk credit for taste,” Genma said as he sheathed to kodachi and handed it to Soun.

“Come on, man! We gotta move this loot.”

“Yes, of course,” Soun said as he accepted his newly won blade. “We must hurry, mustn't we?”

“Yeah, and don't feel bad about any of this,” Genma said. “We're heroes now.”

Soun stared at the old shack and said, “I hope that the Gods agree with you, Saotome-kun.”

“Don't worry, Nakahara-kun,” Genma said. “I'm Yamabushi. I know the Gods well. They're smilin' down on us.”

Soun looked Genma right in the eye. “You're certain of that, are you?”

“Sure am, Nakahara-kun. Now, let's get a move on.”

They found another place to park the rickshaws, but they unloaded both of them this time, scattering their loot out in several different hiding places so that it would not be all in one place.

Then they sat down and ate the last of their rice with mayonnaise. It was not all one could wish for, but it satisfied their hunger.

“We otta hit a yatai somewhere,” Genma said. “It's been too long since I had a filling meal.”

“Too risky and besides, we left that life behind, rember?” Soun said. “You want to blow our chance for freedom now?”

Genma sagged with disappointment. “No, not really.”

“Then we behave until tomorrow afternoon,” Soun said. “If we can't strike a deal with Tendo, _then_ we can think about stealing food from someone.”

“You're right,” Genma said. “It's just that I have been hungry for nearly all my life. My old man did not believe in feeding me or his dogs.”

Soun laughed. “Neither did Happosai.”

“The good part about that is that Happosai's starving now,” Genma said after a good laugh. “I think both my parents must still be alive living on our old farm.”

“Where is their farm?” Soun asked. “You never told me.”

“On the bank of the Mogami river, just outside a village called Hisagekoya,” Genma said. “I hated the place. I hated the summer heat, the winter cold, the bugs and the dust. I even hated the smell.”

“Yes, you told me about how rough it was,” Soun said in a soothing voice. “I feel for you.”

Genma grunted. “Your childhood had to have been nearly as bad if not worse. Let's get some sleep. We gotta long night ahead of us.”

Soun grunted in agreement, but then said, “You sleep first. I can't right now.”

Genma laid over on his back on the bare ground and instantly slept. The sun was just starting to set and the half moon came up just after it got dark. There were very few street lights in Nerima at that time. The district was still largely agricultural.

 

* * *

 

Genma woke Soun up about mid morning the next day. They had dropped the dead punks on their boss's doorstep during the night, then Genma had wondered off to who knows where while it was still dark. Soun very nearly attacked his partner as he woke.

“You have a great deal of nerve, Saotome-kun.”

“You have just enough time to bathe before you leave, Nakahara-kun,” Genma said. He showed no signs of being upset. “You should get a move on.”

Soun did as Genma suggested. He already knew of a large pipe nearby that was for the purposes of irrigation. He stripped of his dusty clothing as he walked over to it. Then he opened the valve on it gasping at the unexpectedly low temperature of the gushing water. He did not worry about being seen. There was no one around for a couple of ri.

While he was bathing, Genma arrived with a bundle of stuff that Soun could not make out until he walked over to his partner.

“What's that?” Soun asked.

Genma threw a towel and it hit Soun in the middle of his bare chest. “Dry off with that, then put this on.”

Soun was amazed at what Genma had scrounged up. He had found a brand new chocolate brown dougi, complete with a black belt, new fundoshi, new tabi and new straw sandals that fit Soun. Soun's eyebrows climbed up near his hairline out of pure reflex, but he did not make the mistake of asking Genma how he had acquired the clothing.

Soun silently dressed while watching Genma fiddling with a brand new lacquered inrou with a chord and coiled dragon netsuke

Once Soun was dressed, Genma asked, “Where's that little box I gave you?” _(An “inrou” is a box that is used to carry personal items in. Japanese clothing does not have pockets)._

“Here,” Soun said, handing it to Genma.

Genma took it and put it inside the inrou. The inrou was highly polished and had decorative dragon of iridescent abalone shell inlaid in its surface. It had a matching ivory bead and netsuke as well. Genma tied it to Soun's belt the way it was meant to be carried.

“There, now you look to be wise _and_ prosperous,” Genme pronounced. “It should impress that banker, I think.”

Soun then realized that Genma had chosen the inrou with care. It's color was a good match for his new dougi.

“You're a genius, Saotome,” Soun said in a choking voice. “Thank you.”

“No need to show me gratitude, old buddy,” Genma said. “You just go make a deal with that banker. That'll be thanks enough.”

“I'd better get on the road, then,” Soun said.'

“Yes, you better,” Genma said with a pat on Soun's shoulder. “Good luck.”

Soun nodded his head and started walking toward central Nerima. It was roughly three ri away, but he had just enough time to meet Akiko at that fancy restaurant.

 _I wonder what we'll be eating,_ Soun thought. _The place is expensive. I bet they serve real b_ _ifuteki (Japanglish for beef steak)_ _there._

 

* * *

 

Tendo Akiko worked hard at making herself look pretty that morning and was rewarded by the look on Soun's face the second he laid eyes on her. He was completely blown way out to sea.

“You look marvelous, Tendo-san,” Soun said, meaning it.

“Thank you, Nakahara-san,” Akiko said. “You look good as well. I especially like your inrou.”

“Oh, this old thing?” Soun asked. “It's nothing.”

Akiko radiated a smile at him. She was pleased when his knees turned into water.

“Shall we go inside?” Akiko asked. “I'm starving. I spent all morning working out and I'm starving.”

“Certainly, certainly,” Soun said as he motioned for her to proceed him. Akiko took this as a very sincere compliment. Most men would not allow a woman to lead them anywhere, but Soun allowed her to lead _him_.

She had sparred against him in a tournament and had been deeply impressed by his skill with the naginata. Not many men used or studied that weapon, but Soun was highly skilled with his. The only reason she had prevailed over him was because it was a formal tournament with unrealistic rules. Soun used his naginata in real fights. The habits he had acquired by fighting for real, tripped him up under tourney rules and Akiko, being a very competitive girl, took full advantage of his tendency to inadvertently break the rules.

Akiko liked Soun very much. Unlike her classmates, Soun had remained proud and undefeated. The Americans had turned most of her people into obedient sheep, accepting of every American word as though the Americans had the Mandate of Heaven.

Akiko hated the ready obeisance that her people had put on display toward the wretched stinking foreigners, but Nakahara Soun was very different. He was a shining example of an undefeated Japanese warrior. A true blue Samurai. Just the sight of him his lean body turned her on. She shivered inside from the thrill of him looking at her. She felt a blush begin to creep up her neck, and decided that it was time to change the subject.

The restaurant was one of the very first restaurants in Tokyo that employed the new cooking technique invented by one Shigeji Fujioka call teppanyaki _(essentially, hot sheet metal cooking)_. It had only been open for a few months and would close two years later.

As it would later turn out, teppanyaki would be more popular among Westerners than among the Japanesem but this place still had the smell of newness about it and was doing a good deal of business. Akiko, unlike most of her neighbors, positively loved the joint.

Soun ate with unexpected gusto until his belly began to swell. He looked far better after he had eaten. Before that he looked rather too much like a wolf lean with hunger.

 _I dared not to take him to father before I fed him,_ Akiko thought. _If I had, Soun would have looked like a_ _ravenous man_ _. Now that he's rounded out, Dad might give him a chance to speak._

“So, are you ready to meet my father?” Akiko asked.

Soun, who had just popped another shrimp into his mouth nearly choked. “Now?” he asked and then gagged.

“No time like the present, you know,” Akiko said with the sunniest smile she could muster. “And he'll almost certainly be in a good mood if you see him today. Today is his day off.”

Soun looked doubtful. “Are you sure of that? I cannot believe that he would be happy to entertain any visitors on his day off. His job forces him to deal with the public day in and day out.”

Akiko rolled her eyes. “He works in the back office. He arrives and leaves by the back door of the bank every day. He barely sees anyone outside the bank supervisors. You coming over today will be a nice break for him.”

Soun chewed his bottom lip. “Are you sure about this?”

“Yes, I am certain, my dear,” Akiko said. “Why are you so reluctant? Are you afraid?”

This ignited the exact response in Soun that Akiko hoped for. He suddenly sat up straighter, got fierce look on his face and all but shouted, “Of course not! Whatever on earth made you think such a thing?”

“You'd be surprised at what I have seen,” Akiko said. She was careful to keep her face serene and her voice calm, almost soothing. “My father is a banker, which makes him a very intimidating man for most people.”

“I do _not_ want a loan,” Soun said. “I have something I want to sell.”

“Sell what to whom?” Akiko asked, allowing an impish smile crawl a wee bit across her face. “Oh, that's right, you said you found an alloy of some sort. Did you bring a sample with you?”

“Yes, but I will only show it to your father,” Soun said. His face was closed, indicating that he had no intentions of giving any ground on this point, but Akiko decided to practice her persuasion techniques.

Akiko pouted at him, and the stubborn to his jaw rippled, as though Soun had regretted his decision. “Fine by me, but you should know that I know my father well and, I know a lot about his business.”

Soun began to vibrate. “Why do you say that?”

“Because I'm his youngest child,” Akiko said. “He dotes on me and has been taking me to the bank since my mother died. I was about knee high when that sad day arrived.”

Soun suddenly looked sad. “I did not realize that your mother was dead, Tendo-san. I am very sorry your loss.”

“La! You never met my mother and I can only just barely remember her,” Akiko said, “but Daddy was ever so sad after she died that he became very affectionate with me.”

Soun tilted his head to one side. “I'm not surprised. Do you look like your mother?”

“Yes, there is a rather strong resemblence between us,” Akiko said. “Now, about this alloy you found...”

Without a word, Soun untied his brand new inrou and then opened it. He took out the little ivory box with its jade inlay symbol for heaven and placed it on the counter. Akiko gingerly picked it up and hefted it.

“Unusually heavy for such a small piece of ivory,” Akiko said.

“Be careful with it,” Soun said. “I have every intention of giving it to your father a token of my appreciation.”

“I'm sure Daddy will be pleased,” Akiko said as she discovered how to open the box. “He loves attractive little things like this.”

What she found in the little box were four small nuggets, one of which was greenish gold in color, another that was silvery yellow, one that was yellowish and the last that was positively pink. She picked one of them up and weighed it in her hand. “This is electrum, isn't it?”

Soun nodded his head in silence.

“Where did you find it?”

“We found it in a stream that washes through the high mountains of Touhoku,” Soun said.

Akiko carefully place the nuggets back in the box and slid the lid closed, then she slid the box along the counter toward Soun.

“How much did you find?”

“We brought back all of it that we _could_ find,” Soun said as he picked up the box and returned it to his inrou. “We spent months in that freezing cold water.”

“How much did you find?” Akiko asked. “If you don't mind saying.”

Soun seemed to want to become taciturn again, but changed his mind.

“About four-hundred kilograms.”

Akiko did some quick mental arithmetic: _four-hundred kilograms is 400,000 grams, divided by thirty-one is about thirteen thousand ounces Troy and gold is about thirty-five_ _US_ _dollars per ounce Troy and_ _the_ _US dollar is worth just a wee bit more than eighteen yen, that works out to something close to eight million yen. Oh, wait, electrum is just about half gold. Make that four million yen for the gold. Still a lot of money and then there's the silver to boot._

“That is worth a great deal of money,” Akiko said.

Soun gave her a grave nod and said, “My share works out to about four million yen for the gold and another million to two million yen in sliver.”

“My Daddy will want a huge cut of that, you know.”

Soun shrugged his shoulders. “If that is it what it takes, we must accept it as the cost of sales.”

“I can tell you a way to avoid such a high cost of doing business,” Akiko said and then blushed.

Soun eyed her suspiciously. “Yes? How do I avoid your father's avarice? He _is_ a banker.”

“You offer it to him as my dowry,” Akiko said quickly. She quaked inside for being so forward, but she did not know what else to do. Japan was just then crawling up out of the devestation visited upon it by WWII and there was a great many women who would be more than willing to marry someone like the very brave and manly Nakahara Soun.

Soun was thrown completely out at sea once again. He in no way had expected her offer.

“You barely know me...”

“Oh, I know you well enough, Nakahara-san,” Akiko said unable to stop the blush reaching her cheeks. “You are the only male I have ever met who was able to hold his own against me and my naginata. And now, you're rich to boot.”

“So you want to marry me for my money?” Soun asked.

“No, silly,” Akiko said. “My inheritance is worth much more than your little dabs of gold and silver. My father is a banker, remember? But I _am_ attracted to you and I am nearly past my prime. I must marry soon and as far as I am concerned, I may as well marry you. The fact that you now have a substantial fortune serves only to make you palatable to Daddy. He would not like marrying me off to a poor man, no matter how manly he was or how good his family is.”

Soun simply sat across from her gawping while his face turned a very nice shade of puce. Tears began trickling down his cheeks.

Akiko was touched by his response, but she summoned her will and hit him with an ugly frown. “You don't like me, do you?”

That made Soun gasp out loud, as though someone had punched him in the gut with the blunt end of her naginata. “No -- I -- er -- wanted to ask -- from the day we met, but -- well -- I couldn't -- I mean...”

She quickly reached over and grabbed him by the back of his huge hand.

“Don't worry, baka,” Akiko said in a soft whisper. “I wanted you to ask me the day we met, but I was afraid of how Daddy would react. Now that you have real money, he will not be a problem for either of us. In fact, I think that he'll be relieved.”

Soun and Akiko started giving each other deeply affectionate stares, but the cashier came around with the check.

“Looks like you two need to find a room,” she said with a broad wink.

Soun was outraged, but Akiko was merely amused.

“Put it on my tab,” Akiko said as she stamped the ticket with her hanko. “We'll pay you at the end of the month as usual.”

Seeing her use a hanko brought Soun up short. “I must acquire on of those soon.”

Akiko smiled at him. “You should wait until after you have heard my father's offer, dearest.”

“Oh, why?”

“Because you never know what sort of counter offer he might make,” Akiko said. “All six of my siblings are girls.”

“You mean he might want to adopt me?” Soun asked sounding startled. “I never considered that.”

Akiko gave him a sympathetic smile. “Until today, you had no reason to consider such a thing, Nakahara-san. It would never have been nothing more than wishful thinking.”

“But you think something will happen today, right?”

Akiko nodded her head. “Yes, it may, or it may not, but we'll never know until you talk to Daddy. Shall we go?”

 

* * *

 

“So you're the man who has my youngest daughter fainting in coils, eh, Nakahara-san?” Tendo Takuma said in a loud cheerful voice. “Good for you!”

Soun could not formulate a reply, so said nothing.

“Come on in and sit,” Takuma said. “No need to be shy.”

Soun walked over to the low table very carefully. Every square inch of the big house screamed its elegance at him and Soun had never felt so out of place.

 _Now I know how those poor Koreans must have felt coming into our house,_ he thought, _even though our house_ _in Korea_ _was no where nearly as impressive as this one is. But it could have been had we been given another decade or so. I suppose that now is the time to give him the box._

Soun pulled his inrou free and opened it. He found the little ivory box and took it in both hands. He bowed as he held it out toward Tendo Takuma.

“Please accept this as a token of my esteem, Tendo-san,” Soun said, bowing his head.

Takuma took the little box with widened eyes.

 _He actually appreciate_ _s_ _it,_ Soun thought, as he almost breathed a sigh of relief, but caught himself. Such a display of emotion in a first meeting would have been unseemly to say the least.

The old man turned the box in about in the lamp light in order to see it better.

“Hmm, walrus tusk -- carved during the late Meiji Era,” Takuma said. “No way to tell who the artist was. It's unsigned. Nice inlay though. Very high quality jade.”

“Yes, my partner found that for me,” Soun said. “Do you see how to open it?”

Takuma slid the lid of the box open and then gasped; he nearly dropped it.

“Amazing!” Takuma exclaimed. “Simply amazing! Where did you find these?”

“In the high mountains of Touhoku,” Soun said. “I can show you on a map if you have one.”

“As it happens, I have many maps of Touhoku,” Takuma said. “I have the entire imperial survey of the region.”

Soun was taken aback. “Oh?”

“Yes, we've been working on a secret project for the Diet,” Takuma said. “They are planning to establish a national park in the region. We have been assessing the values of the lands of Touhoku so that they can put a budget together for the new park.”

Soun went into a full blown panic and began to choke up.

“I did not know that such a thing was about to take place. Perhaps I should leave.”

“Nonsense, man!” Takuma bellowed. “Arata!”

Soun fell silent and quivered. _No doubt this Arata person is an enforcer. He'll hold me until the police arrive._

After a period of dead silence and there was no verbal response and no sound of footsteps, Takuma again shouted, “Arata, where are you? Come here, I need you, boy!”

Soun heard the sound of hurried steps and then a fifteen year old boy appeared at one end of the room. He hurriedly approached the table and fell onto his knees with a thump. He bowed to Takuma and said. “My sincerest apologies, Tendo-dono. I was drying my hands when you called.”

“Next time tell me something when I call,” Takuma said in an calmly irritated voice. “That way, I'll know what you're about.”

“Yes, Tendo-dono,” Arata said.

“Nakahara-san, can you tell me which part of Touhoku you were in?” Takuma asked.

Soun cleared his throat and then replied, “Urabandai, I think. It is difficult for me to say. We got lost on the way there and again on the way here.”

Takuma nodded his head and then said to Arata, “Fetch me those three maps.”

“Hai, Tendo-dono!”

“And bring the photographs as well!” Takuma shouted after the departing Arata.

“I enjoy looking at the photographs of that region,” Takuma said to Soun. “That part of Touhoku has some of the loveliest scenery I have ever viewed.”

Soun grinned. “Yes, it is beautiful when the sky is clear and blue, but most of the time it's overcast -- heavy and gray. It's also freezing cold. Even during the summer, the nights will freeze you if you let it.”

Takuma snorted. “I can just imagine. I wonder how you managed to get back alive, let alone with this stuff. How much of it did you say you brought back?”

“I didn't say, but it is right about four-hundred kilograms,” Soun said.

Takuma's eyebrows crawled up into his hairline. “That's a great deal of money, even by my standards, Nakahara-san.”

“I thought that you might be interested,” Soun said. “I still have trouble believing that we returned all the way to Tokyo with it.”

“Are you planning to stake a claim on this find?” Takuma asked.

“Should we?” Soun asked.

“No, you shouldn't,” Takuma said. “The government is about to buy all of that land for the express purpose of forming a national park. Land use there will be tightly controlled.”

“Which pretty much rules out any mining, right?” Soun asked.

Takuma nodded his head, just as the young Arata returned with the maps and photographs. Soun did not recognized any of the terrain in the photos, but he did recognize most of the terrain on the topographical maps. Even so, there were an enormous number of creeks, small rivers and rills on it and he could not pick out any one of them with certainty. He tried to explain his predicament to Takuma.

“There are so many small rivers and creeks that I cannot point to any one of them as being the right one,” Soun said.

“That's all right,” Takuma said. “Just draw the smallest circle you can to narrow it down.”

Soun used his finger to make a tiny circle on the map in an effort to approximate the location of the mine on the map, “It's somewhere near here, I think.”

Takuma took out a sheet of paper and hastily scratched out some coordinates.

“Now what?” Soun asked.

“Now, we find a refiner and after that, we find a buyer for your bullion,” Takuma said. “Then we'll begin negotiations with the tax authorities. There'll be more than one, you know. The government of FukushimaPrefecture will want a cut of the sales as well as the Imperial -- I mean the National government. I keep forgetting that we have been democratized.”

Soun pulled a long face.

“How do you feel about that, Nakahara-san?”

“It makes me sad,” Soun replied, “but there's nothing to be done about it now.”

“Indeed, Nakahara-san,” Takuma said in a cheerful voice. “Life goes on and we must move along with it. What is the name of your partner?”

“Saotome,” Soun said. “Saotome Genma.”

“Saotome, Saotome,” Takuma said in a speculating tone. “I've heard that name before somewhere.”

“It _is_ a rather common name,” Soun said.

“Yes, but the guy that I met was a Yamabushi,” Takuma said. “A very severe and scrawny old man.”

“Is there any other kind of Yamabushi?” Soun asked with a hearty laugh.

The Yamabushi, who practiced a religion called Shugendou, were persecuted for their refusal to participate in World War II just as the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Hudderites, the Amish and other minor religious sects in the United States were. The Yamabushi were steadfast in their beliefs and adhered to their religious principle despite the desires of the Emperor. In fact, those beliefs flew directly in the face of Imperial Rule. The military leaders of Japan were outraged, just as FDR was outraged by those who did not want to take part in the rapidly growing war in Europe, prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. All of these dissidents were treated harshly on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.

Practicing Shugendou meant that the Yamabushi had to have an enormous amount of self-discipline. In the late fall through the early part of winter, the Yamabushi would dress in all white clothing and go on mountain pilgrimages during the worst weather.

White is the color of death in the Orient. The Yamabushi wear white to symbolize the end of their life as they have known it. They go on long pilgrimages during the cold part of the year to revive their spiritual selves. When they go on such pilgrimages, they eat no meat and no root vegetables, but survive on the parts of plants that the plants can survive without and regrow. This is thanks to the Buddhist influence within Shugendou. But, Shugendou also reflects a great deal of Daoism, a philosophy that values the individual, and that is what obliged the Yamabushi to have nothing to do with the Emperor's War with the United States.

Takuma shook his head and gave out a sharp grunt. “Shugendou is a demanding religion and very odd to boot. The old man had starved himself thin. So you know what he raised on his farm?”

Soun shrugged his shoulders.

“Any and every herb you could name, but his chief crop was rose hips.”

Soun's eyes must have gone wide.

“Yes, I said rose hips,” Takuma said. “He wanted a loan from this bank, so I tried to talk him into changing crops. He wouldn't do that, so we didn't loan him the money. It's funny, if he walked into the bank today, I would have okayed a loan to him, but back then the Yamabushi were being persecuted by the military and the bank had little enough cash to lend regular farmers.”

“It's understandable that you decided not to make the loan,” Soun said. “Did the old man understand why?”

Takuma's face went sour. “I think he was expecting to be turned down. Walked out without so much as a single word of any kind.”

“That sounds like the actions of a confirmed stoic,” Soun said.

Takuma took in a deep breath. “I suppose you'll need some money for you and your partner to get by on until we can get all the arrangements made?”

“A modest sum will do,” Soun was quick to say, hoping that he had not sounded particularly eager.

“Yes, I can tell that you are naturally frugal, Nakahara-san,” Takuma said. “I would not have made such an offer otherwise.”

“You are both kind and observant, Tendo-dono.”

“I try to be kind, but I have little enough opportunity for such exercise,” Takuma said. “Everyone thinks that if you are a banker, you're rolling in money, but behave as though you are, and you'll go broke. One gets into the altruism business only once in this game.”

“How long will the arrangements need?” Soun asked.

“Oh, no more than a couple of months, I should think,” Takuma said. “Quicker than that if I take a hand in them, and I will.”

Soun's face reflected his relief. “That's good to know.”

“So, tell me, Nakahara-kun, what are your intentions towards my daughter?”

Soun's face went from greatly relieved to a horrified red. “I -- ah -- well -- he-he -- She -- I mean I -- She admires me for the way I use a naginata,” Soun finally managed to say. “And I like her for her fighting spirit, but that hardly seems a rational basis for a permanent relationship.”

“Sounds to me as though you've made a good start,” Takuma said. “You're family are all dead, are they not?”

“My parents are dead,” Soun said. “My more distant kin are just that, distant. My parents and I were colonists in Korea and were blamed for Japan losing the war to the Americans.”

Tendo Takuma snorted loudly with disgust. “Of course it was not your fault! You were the scapegoat for policies of the militants in the military. Those pea-brain boobs did not know a thing about practical arithmetic, let alone understand anything about money or how to use it.”

“I wouldn't know,” Soun said. “I was just a boy that was treated like a samurai in Korea, but then treated like a peasant when we returned home. I still know nothing about money or business beyond my need for it.”

“Then my youngest daughter is precisely what you need, Nakahara-san,” Takuma said in his best hale and hearty voice. “She'll teach you all the tricks she learned from me and I learned mine from the best, my father, Tendo Hayato.”

“Is your father still alive?” Soun asked.

Takuma's face revealed the flash of a painful memory. “No, he was in Hiroshima on _that_ day.”

Soun nodded his head. “I am sorry for your loss.”

“Don't be,” Takuma said. “My father lived a long and fruitful life. More importantly, he died very suddenly in what I am told was a very bright flash. He was not among those who died lingering deaths.”

“Good karma, then,” Soun said.

“I like to think so, but who knows? That will have been up to Fudou Myou-ou.”

Soun nodded his head again.

“Here,” Takuma said as he handed Soun a handwritten draft on the bank. “Take my daughter out to someplace nice. Get to know her and then let me know what you think.”

Soun accepted the draft and bowed to Takuma. “Thank you, Tendo-dono. I will never forget this.”

“No, you will not, I'm sure,” Takuma said with a huge smile. “Today is your very first day of freedom from want. What do you have in mind to make a regular living?”

Soun gaped at him.

“Don't make the mistake that so many people make,” Takuma said in a cautionary tone. “You have a little money now, but you'll be surprised by how quickly it slips between your fingers. Money is a lot like water. It's as eager to escape your grasp as anything you have ever tried to hold on to.”

Soun thought about this for a moment and decided that he was being given some sage advice. “To be honest, I have not considered anything just yet. All my energies have been focused on finding a buyer for the electrum.”

“My daughter says that you are a formidable martial artist. Is that true?”

“That depends on what you call formidable, Tendo-dono,” Soun said. “I can hold my own against most.”

“What would you say to becoming an asset recovery agent for the bank?” Takuma asked. “It would allow you to put those hard earned skills to work and you would not even have invest much capital in it.”

“Asset recovery?” Soun asked, sounding puzzled.

“Yes, recovering property that the bank has loaned money to people to buy,” Takuma said. “Many of them are not making their notes and the bank needs someone to persuade them to either pay up, or recover the collateral against the loan.”

“Oh, I see what you mean,” Soun said. “What if I have to kill someone?”

“So long as you kill them in self-defense, neither the police nor the bank will say a word about it,” Takuma said. “Just don't get into a habit of killing because it's the simplest thing to do.”

Soun shook his head. “Never,” Soun said. “I hate the very idea of killing anyone. It's abhorrent to me.”

“Good!” Takuma said. “Looks like I found the right man then. Now, go get my daughter and get her out of my house. I'm sure you two have a great deal to discuss.”

“And I want to discuss these developments with my mining partner,” Soun said.

“Oh, yes, that Saotome fellow you told me about,” Takuma said. “You do that and see if he wants to get into asset recovery with you. I'm sure that having a partner you know you can rely on will be very helpful to you.”

“I'll do my best to sell him on the idea,” Soun said. “He is a very reliable partner. He saved my life many times during the last few years.”

“Good friends are worth more than gold,” Takuma said. “Now, get out of here, its time for my nap.”

Soun bowed to Tendo Takuma one more time and left, eager to find Akiko and Genma so that he coud tell them the good news.

 

* * *

 

Akiko as it turned out, was delighted and looked forward to her life with Soun, but Genma was positive that he did not want anything to do with the asset recovery business.'

“It's too dangerous, Nakahara-kun,” Genma said. “You don't know what you're getting into.”

“We did not know what we were getting into when we started following Happosai, did we?”

“No, we certainly did not,” Genma said with heartfelt fervor, “and after we did learn, it was too late to get out, remember?”

Soun rolled his eyes, but nodded his head.

“Besides,” Genma said as he pulled a photograph from somewhere inside his battered dougi, “I have someone I must go see as well.”

Soun was struck by the beauty of this maiden in the photograph. “You had best hurry, Saotome-kun. Tarry here for another day and she'll be gone.”

“I think that you are absolutely right, Nakahara-kun,” Genma said. “You'll forgive me for leaving before you have our business settled?”

“Of course,” Soun said. “I shall open an account in your name and deposit your share of whatever we receive.”

“Good!” Genma said. “I must be off to propose to this girl before someone else claims her as his own.”

“But wait, Saotome-kun,” Soun said as he grabbed the sleeve of Genma's dougi. “Let's have a drink together before you go.”

Genma gave Soun a knowing grin.

“Just one drink?”

“Oh, well, perhaps two -- three maybe.”

They locked arms and walked to the nearest akachochin _(Red lantern joint. The red lantern signifies that the establishment serves both alcohol and things to eat)._ They walked in together and proceeded to get slobbering drunk while reminiscing about their adventures with Happosai and his band of Merry Men. They finally got to the subject of the mine and quickly became somber. There is nothing worse than being both somber and drunk. Just to change the topic of their conversation held up his full sake cup and said, “Here's to you and your marriage, Saotome-kun!”

They knocked their glasses together and Soun said, “My you have many sons, Saotome-kun.”

“As must you, Nakahara-kun!”

“To the evil old master!” Genma cried out.'

“Hear! Hear!” Soun shouted as he touched glasses with Genma, and then they swallowed their drinks down. Genma poured Soun some more sake and Soun poured sake into Genma's cup.

“Do you suppose that evil little shit has run out of air by now, Saotome-kun?”

“Mph! Bound to have,” Genma said, wiping slobber off of his chin. “That tunnel had a tiny air shaft. It was most likely covered up with falling rock. So, tell me, Nakahara-kun, what are you going to do besides recovering property for your father-in-law's bank?”

“I think I'll open a dojo, Saotome-kun.”

“A dojo, huh? Whatta yer gonna name it?”

“Oh, I don't know,” Soun said. “Something reminiscent of Happosai. How about the Happosai School of Martial Arts?”

“Mph! What's Happosai going to have to do with it?” Genma asked. “He's dead by now.”

“Nothing, Saotome-kun, nothing at all.”

“Then name it something else.”

“All right, how 'bout the Nakahara School of Unrestricted Grappling?”

“That sounds much better!” Genma shouted. “I think that I'll name mine the Saotome School of Unrestricted Grappling.”

“That'll work!” Soun said with a hearty laugh. “We'll each teach our own version of that evil old monster's techniques.”

“Agreed,” Genma said in a slurring voice. “Here's to our schools of martial arts.”

They tapped glasses and then gulped down more saki. Both of them became bleary eyed about three drinks later -- or was it four? Ten maybe? At any rate, they began discussing their future families.

“I think I shall have three children,” Soun declared. “Three's just the right number of kids to raise.”

“That would be too many for me, Nakahara-kun,” Genma said. “I'm planning on having but one, if the first one is a boy.”

“Awright, if you have a boy then bring 'im around and we'll marry him to my daughter if I have one.”

“Yes!” Genma said with tons of excitement in his voice. “Then they can teach one another the moves we have each come up with and the schools will be joined into one.”

“Yes, that is a grand idea, Saotome-kun!” Soun exclaimed. “Here's to the joining of the schools!”

Needless to say, they went on about their plans well into the night until they both passed out from both exhaustion and dehydration. They woke up the next morning in the empty red lantern joint with huge hangovers.

“Saotome, remind to never drink that much ever again.”

“You got it, Nakahara!” Genma said. “My head is killing me.”

About that time the owner came in to open his place of business.

“You boys still here?” He asked. “I thought for sure you'd be gone before now.”

The miserable pair just stared at the man. Neither of them could remember his name. Hell, they could barely remember anything other than the last few words they had shared.

“Give me a minute and I'll fix you guys some willow bark tea,” the owner said. “Does wonders for a hangover.” _(Willow bark has salicylic acid in it, a crude form of aspirin)._

Both of them drank the tea down and both of them nearly threw it up, but both of them managed to keep it down. Then the owner made them drink several glasses of spring water. They stumbled out of the place and each of them went their own way, never to see each other again for fifteen years.

During that time, they wrote letters to one another. Soun wrote Genma to inform him that he had an account at the Bank of Nerima with half of the money they got once the electrum and been refined into its constituent metals and sold. He also informed Genma that Tendo Takuma had adopted him into the Tendo family and that his family name was now Tendo.

Genma wrote back thanking Soun for his kindness and honesty and informed Soun that he and his new wife, Nodoka, were very happily married. Several years went by, and Soun wrote to Genma informing him that he and Akiko had had a daughter together and that they would name her Tendo Kasumi.

Genma wrote back, congratulating Soun on his good fortune, and informed him that he and Nodoka had not had a child yet, but were doing their best to produce one.

A year later, Soun wrote to Genma that Akiko had given birth to yet another daughter, this one would be named Nabiki. Then, another year later, Soun wrote to Genma explaining that Akiko had given birth a third time, yet another girl and that they would name her Akane.

Genma wrote Soun a letter gleefully explaining that Nodoka had her first child, a boy, and that they would name him Ranma.

Soun read the letter and shed tears of joy.

GOOD FOR YOU, SAOTOME-KUN, Soun wrote back. BRING HIM HERE WHEN HE'S OLD ENOUGH AND WE'LL MARRY HIM TO ONE OF MY GIRLS.

And that was the last letter either of the wrote or read from one another for ten long years.


	5. Der Tag

 

It was a typical Saturday morning in late August Nerima. Light rain that had been falling since just before midnight Friday and it was still raining when the sun came up. The rain was one of those slow gentle ones that soak everything through -- the kind that gardeners love because the ground gets soaked and the roots of their plants are able to get a long drink. It fell on the whole of Tokyo, not just the Nerima district, but in the district of Nerima was a very peculiar sort of lavish domicile called Tendo-ke.

The house was unusual in that it sat in the middle of a huge lot by Japanese standards. This large lot was also walled in, a not so peculiar thing in Japan, where everyone is obliged to live cheek by jowl with his neighbors. In such conditions, privacy is a precious thing to be preserved. It just so happened that Tendo-ke was oversize relative to its neighboring domiciles.

The other odd thing about it was that its architecture was of the old post and beam style construction with its roof covered with dark blue-gray clay tiles. It also had a dojo, or training hall connected to the house with a _sukiwatadono_ (breezeway). The dojo was constructed with the same techniques used to build the house. It too was of post and beam construction with a clay tile roof and it even had an engawa with an attached chanoma, or matted room. There had not been a genuine dojo such as this one constructed anywhere in Japan for at least a century, so this structure was very rare. Most martial arts classes by this time were being taught in high school gyms and other such public facilities.

The house did make a few concessions to modernism. It had electric lights and a single fan, but no central cooling or heating. Such luxuries were far in the future. It did have indoor plumbing in that it had sinks, commodes and a newly installed furo lined with ornate tiles and was attached to what can only be described as a roomy changing room, or _koijou_. Almost none of the other houses in this neighborhood had such elaborate plumbing. Most of the neighboring folks took care of their personal hygiene at the public bathhouse or _sentou_ in the central part of Nerima, just a short walk away for most of them.

The Tendo clan, however, were a stand out family. The Tendo patriarch was a very public figure being well known for his asset recovery business and his seat on the Nerima District Council, but he and his family were actually very private people. Mixed bathing during these times was still in fairly common practice, though suffering a rapid collapse in the numbers of people who bathed in mixed groups. The improvements in water supply since the end of WWII was a major factor, but the change in attitude about sex and sexuality were the most influential in bringing such time honored habits to an end.

For instance, Soun and his wife, Akiko, thought nothing of bathing with their three daughters while Akiko was alive. Soun still thought nothing of bathing with his daughters. It was just natural to him. He was a product of his upbringing and he refused to accept the ways and mores of the Western Oni. He was highly resentful of all their influences. So much so that he was practically allergic to all things western.

There was no furniture in the house that was not traditionally Japanese. Most of those pieces of furniture were for storing things and made by hand from _kiri_ _(paulownia_ _wood_ _)_ , chests of drawers, trunks and what have you. There were no chairs, beds, desks or tables either. There were cushions, futons and narrow supports for writing, called _fudzukue_ in Japanese, but otherwise, this house was right out of Meiji Era Japan.

The only modern appliances in the house was a propane stove or, _konro_ , a propane _kotatsu_ under the low dining table that was only used during the winter and a radio with vacuum tubes, not transistors, The single telephone was an old fashioned one with a dial, rather than buttons. It would be decades before a telephone that could be dialed with buttons would appear, because the transistor was what made such a telephone possible. Oh, and there was one other thing, a large old oscillating fan or, _senpuuki_ , made in the nineteenth century. Its body had been made of cast iron and painted black. It was only run on the most hot and humid of days and it had been stationed to one side of the _tokonoma_ _(treasure niche)_ built into the tea room or, _chanoma_.

During prolonged periods of warm weather, the kotatsu was detached from the underside of the table and stowed away in the hall closet, along with the quilted table skirts that Akiko had sewn herself. The house, the yard and the dojo all required regular maintenance and the entire family worked to keep their home clean, comfortable and attractive -- emphasis on clean.

Most of the people in the neighborhood thought that the Tendo family were too old fashioned. So old fashioned in fact, that Soun was often called a brutal reactionary. Okay, so the truth hurts a little. He _was_ a reactionary in a great many ways, and so were his daughters. Were they bothered by this? No, they were proud of their reputations, especially Kasumi, the eldest of the three girls.

At age nineteen, she had graduated from high school with honors and had pretty much taken over for her late mother. Akiko died of cervical cancer a month before Kasumi's eighteenth birthday. Soun and his daughters were devastated despite their knowing well in advance that the Tendo matriarch was dying but, life moves on. Kasumi had her own life to look forward to and was becoming impatient with her father because her biological clock was ticking so loudly and he had done nothing about finding her a husband.

She never came out and said anything overt about it, but she did drop a few subtle hints on a daily basis. She could tell that her hints were affecting Soun, but he remained steadfast and did nothing. He seemed to be waiting on something, but what, Kasumi could not discern or deduce. Meanwhile, Kasumi's biological clock was ticking louder and louder. She knew by Japanese standards that she was almost an old maid. In another two years, she _would_ be an old maid -- an object of pity to her peers. She had to focus on something other than the time trickling by, so she focused on the art.

Kasumi became so accomplished with the naginata that she rivaled both her mother and her father with the weapon, and she was no slouch when it came to unarmed combat either. She could hold her own with almost anyone she met during those relatively modern times. Very few of the Japanese took the time to learn the martial arts since the end of World War Two.

Many aspiring executives did study kendo, which was not a genuine fighting skill, or they took up judo, which was equally stylized and less than effective in a real fight, or they took up the game of golf. Golf in Japan became popular after 1914 after the first full golf course opened in Tokyo.

The techniques that Kasumi had studied with the live naginata was a genuine and very deadly art. She could hold her own with any member of any of the special forces of any military in the world, but such skills meant nothing if you did not keep your physical edge. Keeping her edge is what Kasumi put all of her nervous energy into.

She and her two younger sisters established a system of rotation whereby one of them would have time in the dojo and exercise yard each day while keeping the house up and their father pampered. All three of them were accomplished cooks, but Kasumi had the most talent for cooking, so she was the one who made supper the most often. Nabiki made a tasty and energizing breakfast. Akane became a genius at turning leftovers into tasty bento for luncheons.

Kasumi learned early on to keep an eye on what Akane would put in the bento boxes. She was very fond of capsaicin and was likely to put something into them that would set a person's entire head on fire from time-to-time. Not out of meanness, well mostly not, but simply because she liked spicy food better than most Japanese. Akane might have made a good chef in Thailand or Mexico, but in Japan she was a miserable flop.

Of the three, Nabiki had the least amount of interest in the martial arts. This is why she became so good at cooking breakfasts. She tended to devote most of her time to her school work and allow her study of the art to slip. Kasumi had to work on her to keep her in top shape. Akane, on the other hand, would readily allow her homework to go undone in favor of practicing the art. She was especially fond of the hand-to-hand fighting and only took up the katana and naginata because Soun had demanded that she do so. She was nearly as good as Kasumi when it came to fighting hand-to-hand. Because Soun had collected so many knives, Akane did acquire considerable skill in the use of the shorter blades, particularly the push knives.

Kasumi held herself to a tough and rigid schedule of exercises starting at four in the morning. She got out of bed early and started her day with several kata devoted to the use of the naginata, followed them by the twelve kata that her father had developed for the infamous “Anything Goes School of Martial Arts.” This too was a deadly art that demanded a great deal of concentration in order to use it and not kill anyone. Kasumi had placed a great deal of emphasis on this particular part of her physical education that morning.

After she finished the last move of the twelfth kata, which was painfully esoteric in nature, she slid one of the outer doors open. The rain was still falling. The hot air was laden with moisture and Kasumi felt it increase as she slid the door open and looked out across the vast backyard of Tendo-ke. The rain was splashing on the basalt stones artfully placed around the koi pond and the tiny drops made the waters in the pond dance with interlocking ripples.

Kasumi sat in seiza, meditating on this peaceful scene sliding gently into deep meditation. She was still sitting there in deep meditation when Nabiki walked into the dojo.

“Sis?” Nabiki asked in a tentative voice. “Dad wants us all in the chanoma for a family meeting.”

Kasumi shook her head to clear her head of the comforting dream-like state of meditation.

“Oh, my! A family meeting?” Kasumi asked. “Whatever for?”

“He didn't say.”

Kasumi rose to her feet. It was a testament to her training that she was able to rise strait up out of the seiza position. Most people would lose their circulation after having stayed in that posture for so long.

“I guess I had better get a shower soon,” Kasumi said. “Is breakfast ready?”

“Almost,” Nabiki said. “I had to put it on a low burner. Dad wants to have the meeting before we eat.”

“And I'll have to attend smelling like a plow horse,” Kasumi said with a frown.'

Nabiki shrugged her shoulders.

“It's Dad, Kasumi, that's just the way he is. He seemed to be excited if that helps any.”

Kasumi placed her fists on her hips and said, “Well, it certainly adds to the mystery of this morning, doesn't it?.”

Nabiki handed her elder sister a towel and together they walked into the main house. Soun was still searching about for Akane.

“Akane?” Soun shouted. “Akane! Where could that child gotten off to?”

“It's Saturday, Dad,” Nabiki said. “She stays in her room reading all day on Saturdays.”

Soun pitched his head back and rolled his eyes.

“I had quite forgotten that,” Soun said. He tore up the stairs shouting, “Akane? Akane!”

Kasumi watched her pumped up father and shook her head.'

“I wonder how that bee got into his bonnet this early.”

“He got excited right after the mail was delivered,” Nabiki said. “He started crying, not that him doing that is so unusual.”

“But he doesn't do that over just anything,” Kasumi said. “What could it have been?”

Kasumi and Nabiki then pounced on the mail that Soun left on the dining table. They found nothing that might have roused their father's passions.

“Just bills and ads,” Nabiki said.

“Mmm.” Kasumi murmured.

Soun suddenly burst out of Akane's room with her walking close behind him. They descended the stairs quickly. Soun was holding something in his hand that looked like a postcard.

“Let's all gather around the dining table,” Soun said in his hale fellow well met voice. He used that voice when he was campaigning for office. The three girls all eyed one another. They were suspicious of what was on his mind. They finally settled at the dining table, with Soun sitting at its head with his back to the open doors of the engawa.

He cleared his throat and said, “I just received a post card from a dear old friend of mine. He and his son have been on a training journey in China.”

Kasumi and her sisters eyed their father with questioning looks.

“And so?” Nabiki asked aloud.

“Yea, Dad, what's your point?” Akane asked.

Kasumi nodded at her father, but said nothing.

 _He certainly seems excited to have heard from this old friend of his,_ Kasumi thought. _I wonder what this means._

“They're going to be here some time today.”

“So you're eager to see this old friend of yours, right?” Nabiki asked.

Soun nodded his head with great enthusiasm.

Akane's eyes widened as she said, “And you want us to be on our best behavior, right?”

Soun again nodded his head enthusiastically.

“What are their names, Father?” Kasumi asked. “I must certainly get a bath before they arrive.”

“Saotome,” Soun said.

 _He can barely contain himself,_ Kasumi thought.

“The father's given name is Genma and his son's name is Ranma.”

The younger girls both felt a bit let down and nodded their heads at this, but Kasumi remained suspicious.

“So what are you not telling us, Father?” Kasumi asked.

“Ranma is coming here to get to know all of you,” Soun said. “He is to become engaged to of one you.”

Kasumi's heart fell into the pit of her stomach.

 _But I'm the eldest!_ Kasumi screamed in her mind. _He's got to be mine._

Akane and Nabiki rolled their eyes at what Soun had said.

“Don't you mean he's coming here to have an omiai with Kasumi, Dad?” Nabiki asked.

“Yeah, Dad,” Akane said. “Kasumi's the oldest of us. Shouldn't he be coming here to get to know her?”

Soun cleared his throat and said, “Well, Genma and I did not quite think this all the way through. Our goal was to join the schools through marriage and I have three daughters...”

Kasumi and her sisters all stared daggers at Soun in unison.

“Now, wait just a moment, girls,” Soun said in a pleading voice. “If just one of you will marry him, my deal with Genma will be satisfied.”

Akane growled and turned her head to one side. Nabiki clapped her right palm to her forehead, hit the table with her right elbow, the buried her chin in her right hand glaring at Soun with heartfelt menace.

Kasumi sat stock still staring at Soun with a hurt look.

“How old is he, Father?” Kasumi asked.

Soun again cleared his throat before answering, “He's sixteen.”

 _And here I was expecting someone old enough to truly appreciate me and Father drags this sixteen year old_ _boy_ _in here to marry me,_ Kasumi thought. _What on earth did I do to deserve this? I'm getting a husband I will have to raise._ _Isn't it enough_ _I_ _raised_ _my two sisters_ _? What is Father thinking?_

Akane's nose wrinkled with outrage and she jumped to her feet and placed her hands on her hips.

“Boys that age suck, Dad!” She shouted in a scolding voice. “But you don't know that, do you? You would if you came to our school once in a while.”

“Yeah, Dad,” Nabiki said in a scornful voice. “I'm a year older than than this -- Ranma.”

Kasumi's eyes were burning with anger and she could not stop the tears running down her cheeks. Her face began puffing up as it reddened with embarrassment and anger.

“Girls, do try to withhold your judgement until you've met him, all right?”

Kasumi and her sisters again stared daggers at Soun.”

“Please leave us, Father,” Kasumi said. “I am the eldest and I want to talk this over with my sisters without you present.”

Soun gave Kasumi a hurt look and started crying again, but he got to his feet and started toward the master bedroom on the ground floor.

“Please wait in the dojo, Father,” Kasumi said in a voice shaking with anger. “I'll send one of my sisters to you after we finish our discussion.”

Soun was shocked by this, but he complied.

The three girls waited in silence until Kasumi was certain that their father was out of earshot.

Akane said, “Kasumi, you're the eldest. What's Dad doing?”

Nabiki was equally outraged. “He's being an ass, is what he's doing, Akane.”

Kasumi inhaled deeply and said nothing.

“You wanted to talk this over with us, right Sis?” Nabiki asked.

“Yeah, Kasumi say something,” Akane said.

“It would serve Father right if we all three laid claim on this kid,” Kasumi said.

Both younger girls tittered at this idea. After their laughter died down, Nabiki was the first to recover.

“That would lead to serious trouble in the future, Kasumi-onechan,” Nabiki said.

“Yeah, Kasumi,” Akane said. “I hate all the boys I know that are his age. I don't know that I could get along with him. Let alone marry a creep like that.”

“You don't know if he's a creep or not,” Nabiki said in a dire tone. “He could be quite good looking for all you know.”

Akane rolled her eyes in response.

“Not all of us thinks that the entire world revolves around boys, Nabiki!”

Kasumi slapped the table with her palm. “Enough!”

She inhaled a deep breath while both her sisters stared at her expectantly.

“We won't actually know anything about him or his family until he arrives here,” Kasumi said. “Remember, the quality of his family is the key to happiness for the one of us who marries him, but I have something else to say that you two must know.”

The two younger girls stared at Kasumi with questioning looks, and that forced Kasumi to take yet another deep breath. She had been dreading this discussion for months.

“As you know, our mother died of cervical cancer,” Kasumi said.

“Yeah, but what does that have to do with this guy?” Nabiki asked.

Akane merely glared at the ceiling.

“The cause of cervical cancer is unknown, it is a mystery that doctors have been working to solve for decades now.”

Nabiki nodded her head.

“So, get to the point, Kasumi,” Akane said.”

“The point is the gynecologist who treated mother told me that she thinks that cervical cancer is caused by a sexually transmitted disease,” Kasumi said. “She said that she suspected herpes was the culprit.”

The two younger girls stared at her in silence. The silence grew until it was painful.

“I have never asked father about this, but mother's doctor thought that Mother caught the disease from him,” Kasumi said.

Akane's face started to crumble like a stale cookie and Nabiki stared at Kasumi with horror on her face.

“So now, I _must_ to know, have either of you ever had sex with anyone?”

“With anyone?” Akane asked as tears leaked past her eyelids and streamed down her cheeks.

“Give it a rest, Akane,” Nabiki said. “Kasumi and I both know how you feel about Tofu-sensei.”

Akane gave Nabiki a horrified stare.

“Well, Akane,” Kasumi asked, “have you?”

Akane was now outraged. “Of course not!”

Kasumi turned her eyes on Nabiki, they were as cold as ice.

“Not with a guy, I haven't,” Nabiki said looking shame-faced. “Some of my friends and I experimented on each other, though.”

Kasumi heaved a sigh.

“So you and I both must go get checked out by a gynecologist then.”

Both Akane and Nabiki stared at Kasumi in open mouth shock.

“You've had sex?” Nabiki asked.

“Who with?” Akane asked sounding shocked and horrified.

“With whom, you mean,” Kasumi said to correct Akane's grammar purely out of long habit.

“Okay, with whom have you had sex, Kasumi?” Nabiki demanded to know.

Akane's hard stare confirmed Nabiki's question.

“Who doesn't matter now, does it?” Kasumi said. “What matters is that Nabiki and I get our blood checked for infections, for herpes in particular. Fortunately, mother's gynecologist is still here in Nerima. We can go to her.”

“How can you say that, Kasumi?” Akane shouted. “You've had sex and we don't know the person you've had it with?”

“It's none of your business, baby sister,” Kasumi snapped. “It happened two years ago and we are both over that now. Nothing ever came of it and nothing ever will.”

“It had to have been rape,” Akane muttered.

Kasumi rolled her eyes.

“You win a fight with a mob of boys everyday and you think that I got raped?” Kasumi asked. “Do you know anyone capable of taking me by force?”

Akane suddenly looked sheepish. Nabiki looked disgusted.

“Well so much for Saint Kasumi,” Nabiki said. “The only reason I have held back was because of how you behaved. Had I known I'd have...”

“You would have done what?” Kasumi asked. “Given in to temptation?”

“Duh!” Nabiki responded with feigned astonishment, which caused Akane to roll her eyes with disgust.

“What were you thinking, Kasumi?” Akane asked.

“I was thinking that I wanted sex, little sister,” Kasumi said with carefully controlled equanimity, “and so I had oral sex a few times with a boy whom I thought I was in love with, but he went away to college and I haven't heard a word from him for over a year now.”

Akane was clearly outraged, but Nabiki was not the least bit surprised.

“I doubt if I will ever hear from any of my friends, either,” Nabiki said. “Things change as you grow up.”

Kasumi gave Nabiki what she hoped was a sage nod.

“I thought that having oral sex was completely safe, and it is, provided all you want to do is to avoid getting pregnant. I found out later that any transfer of body fluids from one person to another -- any transfer at all -- can also carry an infection. That is why you and I must go and have a blood test done.”

“I can't believe you two!” Akane shouted.

“Shh, Daddy might hear you!” Nabiki hissed.

Akane's control returned immediately.

“That's much better, Akane,” Kasumi said. “I would not have been at all surprised if you had already had sex, given the number of willing boys you deal with at school.”

Disgust played across Akane's face. She slapped the table with her entire forearm and said, “None of those creeps appeal to me at all.”

“So I've heard,” Kasumi said in a calm voice. “You've been beating them up in response, right?”

Nabiki laughed out loud. “I'll say she has. I make lots of money taking bets on her fights.”

Akane glared at Nabiki and Nabiki responded by sticking her tongue out at her younger sister.

“Ladies, please!” Kasumi said in a sharp voice. “We still have an important matter to discuss. We must also come up with a way to have our putative fiance tested for diseases as well.”

Akane shuddered visibly.

“This Ranma guy is all yours, Kasumi-onechan,” Akane said. “I can't stand boys my age.”

Nabiki was apparently of the same mind.

“Yeah, I want to go to college before I settle down,” Nabiki said. “I have ambitions beyond having babies and such.”

“Well, that's not a woman's lot in life, isn't it?” Kasumi said. “You can either marry a man or make do without having sex so that you don't ever have a chance of getting pregnant or risk catching a nasty disease.”

“Or you could become a lesbian and settle down with one woman by choice,” Akane said with another heartfelt shudder. “I don't think I could ever do such a thing.”

Nabiki's eyebrows shot up to her scalp. “Me either. I gave that a try and it just didn't satisfy me. I was as hungry for sex right after as I had ever been.”

“Girls, take my word for it, you'll never be as ready as you are right after,” Kasumi said.

Both of the younger girls stared at Kasumi with puzzled looks on their faces, then after several seconds, both of them burst out with giggles.

“It doesn't seem to matter which version of sex you have, it's never enough. Understand?”

Both Akane and Nabiki nodded their heads as they giggle more.

“Now then, what are we going to do when this putative fiance of ours arrives?” Kasumi asked.

“As far as I'm concerned, Kasumi, he's all yours,” Akane said with yet another hard shudder.

Nabiki slapped the table top. “You have yet to even lay eyes on him, Akane. You might well have a change of heart, once you see him.”

Akane answered by rolling her eyes.

Kasumi was faintly amused.

“Nabiki's right, baby sister,” Kasumi said. “He could well be a real catch. We simply don't know.”

“He did train in China,” Nabiki said. “That had to have been difficult.”

Kasumi rolled her eyes. “Which would mean nearly everything to Father.”

Akane looked disgusted. “So he hiked all the way to China. Big deal.”

Nabiki gave Akane a hard stare. “You mean swam to China, right? There's a lot of water between Japan and China you know.”

Akane gave Nabiki a hard stare.

“Oh, I get it,” Nabiki said. “You think everyone is a hammer like you. That they hiked across the bottom of the Sea of Japan?”

Akane gave out a derisive snort.

“Ladies, please!” Kasumi almost shouted. “Nabiki, let's get breakfast going so that we can send Akane out to the dojo with a tray of food for Father. I'm famished and I know that he is bound to be hungry by now.”

“So you're going to let him eat alone in the dojo,” Nabiki asked. “That's not like you.”

“He deserves a cold breakfast alone after pulling this stunt, don't you think?” Kasumi asked. “Springing this on us as though all we are to him is a string of brood mares?”

Akane's face registered heartfelt disgust, but Nabiki's face remained as smooth and glass like a high mountain lake on a calm day.

“Yes, he does,” Nabiki said. “Come on, Kasumi. Give me a hand in the kitchen and let's get this mess going.”

“Akane, why don't you touch up the house where it needs it and then go get dressed for company?”

Akane heaved a sigh. “Okay, I'll inspect the house, but I'm not going to put on a kimono for this. He'll just have to see me in a clean gi.

“That's all right, Akane-chan,” Kasumi said in a gentle voice. “A clean gi will be just fine.”

“So come on, Sis,” Nabiki said. “Breakfast won't finish itself.”

By the time Akane was finished with touching up the house, Kasumi and Nabiki had breakfast cooked and ready to serve. Akane carried a tray of food out to the dojo. Once again -- Soun was shocked -- speechless.

“Kasumi wants you to eat breakfast here, Dad,” Akane said. “We still have some things we need to work out.”

Soun nodded his head and sniffled, but said nothing, so Akane returned to the house only to find Kasumi and Nabiki sitting at the table. Kasumi had already loaded her plate and was wolfing down food. Nabiki was sipping at her tea and there was a steaming plate of food and a hot cup of tea at her place, so Akane sat down without a word and started eating.

After a few minutes of complete silence, Kasumi said, “We have some things to think about and discuss. Like, what will we do if we all fall for him?”

Nabiki smirked said, “In that case, you marry him and it will be up to Akane and me to then decide whether or not we want to be his concubines.”

Akane frowned at that statement. “I don't know that I would share anyone I was intimate with.”

“He might not give you a choice, baby sister,” Kasumi said. “Men step out on their wives all the time -- especially here in Japan.”

Akane rolled her eyes. “Why can't we marry someone just because we love him and he loves us? Why is it so complicated?”

Nabiki reached across the table and put her hand on Akane's forearm.

“Because humans are not naturally monogamous, Akane,” Nabiki said.

“Some of us are!” Akane snapped.

“The first goal of marriage is to protect the welfare of mothers and their children,” Kasumi said. “All the rest is to protect the interests of the husband.”

“Mmm.” Nabiki agreed. “So long as you don't get pregnant by some man you're not married to, you're in good shape.”

“So, you're both wanton sluts, is that what you're saying?” Akane shouted.

“All of us are to one degree or another,” Kasumi said. “There are times when I want to feel a man inside that I could just scream.”

“So what was that like?” Nabiki asked. “Give us the benefit of your experience, Sis.”

“I don't know,” Kasumi said. “I was never penetrated. All my partner I did was to have oral sex.”

Akane was shocked and disgusted, but fascinated. All three emotions played across her face. Nabiki, on the other hand, was neither shocked nor disgusted. She was curious.

“Did you swallow?”

Kasumi burst out laughing.

“Once,” she said between giggles. “Right before he left town. You should have heard him whimper. _That_ was thrilling.”

“So you would have done that again if you had gotten the chance?” Akane asked. Her disgust was plainly written on her face.

Nabiki was so thrilled that it made her squirm.

Kasumi took a bite of an onigiri and nodded her head silently as she chewed the rice.

“I suppose that's much better than spitting it out and wiping your chin. Huh, Sis?” Nabiki said, then giggled.

Kasumi spit rice all over everywhere.

“Kasumi!” Akane shouted.

“I'm sorry, Akane,” Kasumi said. Her voice told both of the younger girls that Kasumi actually regretted what she had done. “Now, where were we? Oh, I remember now. We simply must meet this boy's mother. Mother-in-laws can be dreadful tyrants, you know.”

“Yes, I've heard,” Nabiki said. “It's odd that his father is bringing here without his wife, isn't it?”

“I don't know, Nabiki,” Akane said “She might be dead or bedridden.”

“Either way, we shall have to try and meet her before we agree to anything. Yes?”

Both of the younger girls nodded their heads.

“Good. Now, what about his schooling?” Kasumi asked.

“I don't know, Kasumi, does the master of a dojo really need a formal education -- outside the dojo?” Akane asked.

“He's got have some knowledge of bookkeeping at least,” Nabiki said. “If you can't count your money, you'll never know whether or not you're making any.”

“I took bookkeeping at Furinkan, Nabiki, and home economics,” Kasumi said, “I didn't learn enough to get by in either class.”

Akane nodded her head. “I tried bookkeeping, and it was so boring that I changed to algebra. I've done okay in home economics.”

Nabiki snorted. “All home economics teaches you is how to get by doing housework without your parents looking over your shoulder. I meant real bookkeeping. At least enough to get a job as an accounting clerk.”

Akane scoffed. “And how many accountants do you suppose Daddy has had to collect from?”

“Lots,” Nabiki said. She was completely unruffled, “but all of them were losers. They lacked the instincts for Capitalism.”

Akane blew out her breath in exasperation.

“Now, now, girls,” Kasumi said. “Let's not quibble, shall we? I think that schooling will have to depend on what our putative fiance already knows. If he's reasonably well educated, we will be safe in allowing him to skip school and then you can teach him the basics of bookkeeping, Nabiki.”

Akane buried her face in both palms.

“And Akane can teach him manners,” Kasumi said brightly.

Both of the younger girls gave Kasumi a hard stare.

“And what are you going to teach him?” Nabiki asked.

“The naginata for starters,” Kasumi said without so much as a blink. “And whatever else he needs to know. I'm sure he'll have some lessons for us. He's been to China, after all.”

“So, he's going to come here and we are going to put him through a series of tests, is that it?” Nabiki asked.

“And if he fails those tests?” Akane asked.

“If he fails, we shall have to dismiss him,” Kasumi said with a genuine smile.

 

* * *

 

On the far side of Nerima, sweating in the heat and humidity, a diminutive girl with red hair and large breasts was struggling rather manfully with a fully grown panda. That struggle was drawing a crowd, despite the soaking rain.

“Do I look someone a girl could prize, you hairy oaf?” the girl screamed at the panda. “I'm not ready to marry, yet! I'm just sixteen, for crying out loud!”

The panda shrugged its shoulders and attacked the girl, barely missing her with a swipe of its huge left paw. The girl dodged the blow by leaping into the air and planting a kick with her left foot in the panda's face. This caused the panda to fall on its back.

“I gotta go back to that place with the Springs of Woe and see if there's a cure for this damned curse!” The girl shrieked. “I don't like havin' this body. I'm bottom heavy; I got these great big floppy boobs and no man parts!”

The panda did its best to pretend to be a rug. The girl's face went from outrage to concern.

“Hey, Shit-daddy,” she shouted. “You okay?”

The panda lay very still.

“Fuck!” The girl cursed. “Now I gotta go find a doctor for him.”

She then stepped in close to check the panda and it responded by wrapping her up in all four of its legs. The girl and most of the crowd screamed in unison.

“You sorry old bastard!” The red head shouted. “Why can't you learn to behave?”

The panda never attempted to respond, it merely rolled over on top of the girl, pinning her face down on the wet asphalt.

“Getcher big ass offa me.” The girl gasped out. “You're mashin' the wind outta me. And yer hurtin' my boobs!”

Everyone in the crowd saw that this had to be true. The girl was wearing a pack that was at least two times to large for her, plus she had the full weight of the panda pressing down on her. No one dared to approach this odd pair, but one of them did throw a chunk of broken pavement at the panda. It hit the panda in the ribs, causing it to roll off of the girl with a sharp grunt. Once on its back, the panda howled with pain.

The girl sprang to her feet, shrugging off the heavy pack. She assumed an obvious fighting stance and shouted, “Bring it on, panda-man! I'm ready for ya now.”

The panda was on its back, thrashing about as though it had been mortally wounded, but the girl watched in disgust.

“Aw come on, Shit-daddy! Twice in the same fight?” The girl asked in a high pitched sneering voice. “You _gotta_ know better'n 'at.”

The panda responded by rolling suddenly and springing up on its hind legs, making it nearly twice as tall as the diminutive red head. The fighting became far more serious after that, but the short and powerful teenager managed to hold her own. She started zipping inside the panda's guard, landing a punch or two before zipping out of its reach again. The panda staggered around in tight circles doing its best to fend off the girl's attacks, but to little avail -- apparently.

“Ya damned ole idjit! I ain't got no time for no fiancee and I ain't in no shape ta win one. We gotta go back to China and find a cure for this fucking curse!” The teenage red head shrieked.

She sounded very much like the perfect scold and was matching her screams with blows to the panda's body. The crowd that had gathered around this strange pair was staring at them with mouths open in shock.

The panda, though, had finally reached its target. It was a traffic sign that had been run over and was now loose in its hole. The panda seized this less than well mounted sign and struck the teenage girl with it, knocking her out cold. The panda heaved a sigh of apparent relief. Then it waddled over to the huge pack that the girl had shrugged off during her struggle and picked it up with its right fore paw. Then it waddled back over to the girl and picked her up with its left fore paw and draped her limp body across its shoulder.

The crowd gasped in horror and several of the men's determination to rescue the girl registered in their faces. This was not unnoticed by the panda. It faced about in all four directions, growling out a warning each time. This intimidated the crowd enough that it felt safe to make tracks, sure that it would not be followed. It's efforts were helped by a sudden increase in the rain that provided hazy curtains of falling water for it to disappear behind.

 

* * *

 

“Remember, ladies, we are not to discuss any of this with father,” Kasumi said. “He will only try to stop us and that will make a mess of things.”

“Okay, but I just hope that this guy's good looking,” Nabiki said.

“Hmmph! He had better be good in the art,” Akane said, “or I'll do for him the way I do those lecherous creeps at school.”

Kasumi gave her habitually obstreperous baby sister a fond smile.

“Very well, Akane, the art is the first thing he should be accomplished at, so we'll let you test him,” Kasumi said in a sweet voice. “Happy now?”

Akane gritted her teeth and popped her knuckles as she nodded at Kasumi.

“All right, it's settled,” Kasumi announced. “Now that we have a plan of action, I must go get a shower. It wouldn't do for me to meet my prospective fiance smelling like a mule.”

Akane produced Kasumi's house coat and a fresh pair of tabi socks, and Nabiki handed her a towel. Kasumi hurried away into the changing room of the furoba, while the other two girls went upstairs to their respective bedrooms.

Tendo-ke was a five bedroom house. It had four bedrooms on the second floor with a master bedroom on the ground floor adjacent to the furoba. The furoba was almost as large as the chanoma when you included the changing room and two stalls with commodes. It also had twin sinks in the changing room so that at least two of the girls could deal with their cosmetics and hair at the same time. Handy on hectic mornings.

Soun had a place at one end of the house with a small slab and a hose bib. He preferred to bath and shave in cold water, then go into the furo for a prolonged soak in hot water. So that reduced his time in the furoba to the times when he needed to relieve himself or when he was luxuriating in the deep hot waters of a tiled furo long enough to allow him to stretch out and relax.

Kasumi stopped in the changing room and stripped off her smelly sweat soaked gi, let down the heavy braids of her chestnut hair and sat down on one of the plastic stools to bathe.

Upstairs, Akane stripped off her outer clothing and then donned a sports bra and a fresh clean gi. She was proud of her black belt and finished its knot with a snap. Then she put a fresh pair of tabi and went downstairs to await the arrival of their guests.

Nabiki, for her part, dithered over which of her cotton yukata to wear. She had several that still fit her and they all had unique prints and colors.

“Let's see, Kasumi will likely wear one of those matronly dresses that are in fashion nowadays,” Nabiki muttered. “She's washing her hair right now, so it will not be dry before they get here. She'll likely just tuck that lovely hair of hers under a _ho-okaburi_ (Japanese style head scarf) and be done with it. She'll look every bit the marriageable woman that she is. That will be hard for me to compete with. I'm just not the domestic type. I'm more of an office type girl.”

Nabiki shuddered.

“That's wrong. I'm a Tendo. That means I'll have to be the boss of whatever business it is that I'm working at. I should wear the most formal and simple yukata I have.”

 

* * *

 

Soun crept up onto the engawa and peaked inside at the empty chanoma.

“Hello?” He asked in a soft voice. “Girls?”

Akane appeared on the balcony and said, “Oh, I was just about to come out to the dojo and get you, Daddy. Sorry.”

“That's quite all right, Akane,” Soun said. “Would you make some tea? We'll need enough to go around for us as well as our two guests.”

“Sure thing, Dad,” Akane said in a cheerful voice. She then ran down the stairs and into the kitchen and put a brass kettle full of water on the stove.

Soun sat down at the dining table, lit a cigarette and then picked up the paper. Akane went up to her room and got her history book. Of all the subjects she learned at Furinkan, history turned to out to be the most troublesome for her. Japan had a lot of history to study. It was an old country and its history was long and complicated. Just keeping the names of the historic figures straight was a chore, never mind all those dates.

Nabiki finally settled on a very plain yukata. It was mostly pink but it turned a lovely shade of lavender at the hem. It had only a few stems of flowers depicted on it and they were white. Like most girls her age in Japan, her hair was long, but it was more of a dark chestnut color than the vastly more common black of the Orient. Nabiki tied her hair back with a turtle shell comb. Satisfied with her hair, she put on a fresh pair of tabi and went downstairs with her accounting text under her arm. It would give her something to do while waiting on their guests to arrive.

Kasumi paid very close attention to her hair. It was long and thick and took forever to dry. This was one of those times when she hated it, but then without such luxuriant hair, she understood that she would not be all that attractive. She was overly muscled for a Japanese girl. It made her strong and healthy, but most Japanese men favored the flabby and frail types to a woman with her physical gifts. Thankfully, much of this was offset by her rather busty figure. Had she grown up on a diet of hamburgers, fries and soda water, she would have been obese.

Kasumi stood in front of one of the mirrors and put on basic makeup, then wrapped her still damp hair in a towel. Then she shot up the stairs to her room to put on proper clothes.

 

 

* * *

 

Outside the gate of Tendo-ke, the panda was again struggling with its red headed companion. She was thrashing about and screaming at the top of her voice and beating the panda's back every time she got the chance which, was more often that the panda would have liked, but it persisted. It opened the gate, walked up the flagstone walk to the front door and pulled the bell cord which rang a surprisingly loud bell. The red head continued with her antics.

 

* * *

 

 Hearing the bell ring, Soun and Nabiki leaped to their feet.

“That must be them,” Soun said in a tense voice.

“Let's go and welcome them,” Nabiki said now that her possible mate had arrived, she was suddenly turned on.

Akane remained seated at the table. She less than happy with this unexpected and rapidly developing situation. She was not at all sure that she wanted to take part in any of it. She just rolled her eyes as Soun and Nabiki disappeared down the front hallway.

Soun opened the outer door of the _genkan_ (foyer/mudroom) and was shocked by the sight of a panda holding a very large backpack with a thrashing teenage child on its shoulder. He and Nabiki went into a panic and fled back down the hall and into the chanoma. This shocked Akane who rose quickly to her feet.

The sight and smell were wonderfully horrible. The panda was furry and smelly and the thrashing body he was carrying had not bathed for at least a week. Akane could hear the person riding on the panda's shoulder screaming. It sounded much like an outraged female voice.

“Unhand me, you hairy oaf!” Then came the sound of fists striking the panda's back. “Yer scarin' 'em shitless, Pop. Put me down!”

The panda stopped at the edge of the straw mats and put the teenager down on its feet.

The teenager looked like a rag bag with a deeply browned doll's head sticking out of the top. It's shirt was made of heavy red silk with arm holes twice as large as they should have been, and it wore dark indigo britches that were too big, too long and tied at the ankles with yellow silk ribbons and the waist band was gathered into pleats and held by narrow belt. It's hair was a deep carrot red, almost a sorrel color. Worse, it had sapphire blue eyes. They made every Japanese person who saw the waif's face shudder. Soun quivered like a frightened horse at the sight of this child who reminded him of the Western Oni.

The teenager pulled its braided queue around to its front and started fiddling with the frayed end of it, looking deeply embarrassed.

“Saotome Ranma here,” it said in a shy voice as it stared down at its bare feet. “Sorry about all this.”  
Soun was still staring at the waif when Nabiki took it on her own to examine things rather closely. After a few seconds of visual study, she felt the waif's chest with her left hand.

“One-hundred percent female, I tell you,” Nabiki said in a shocked voice as she continued to massage the waif's breast. “He's a she.”

“Wudja stop that?” Ranma asked in a sheepish voice. “It's disturbin'.”

The three Tendo girls stared daggers at Soun. He wobbled about for a few seconds, then collapsed to the floor. Kasumi was deeply incensed.

“We were expecting a man to show up here,” Kasumi said in the politest tones she could muster, “but you're welcome to stay anyway. Where's your father?”

“Well...uh...he's...”

Akane began to cackle while Kasumi and Nabiki took turns staring daggers at their prostrate father. If looks had been spears, he would have turned into a fountain of blood, but he was oblivious and started snoring, which only annoyed two of the girls further.

“Never mind all that,” Akane said. “your showing up here is one of the funniest things I have ever seen. Want to be friends?”

“Uh...well...sure!” The waif said, still fiddling with the end of her queue.

“Come on!” Akane said in an enthused voice. “I gotta show ya our dojo.”

“O...okay?”

“Wait, you haven't rested or bathed for days, have you Ranma-chan?” Kasumi asked.

The waif shook her head. Kasumi studied her closely and was struck by how beautiful her face was structured. It tended to offset her heavily tanned skin and the freckles. Even the sapphire blue of her eyes became less exotic after she studied this new acquaintance.

“And you've been fighting as well,” Kasumi said. “Your back is cut in several places and your elbows are scraped -- probably your breasts as well, are they not?”

The waif nodded her head.

“Akane, show our guest to Father's outdoor bath,” Kasumi said. “Nabiki and I shall be along shortly with fresh clothing and first aid materials.”

Kasumi's tone brooked no arguments, which made Akane's eyes widen. ''

“Yes, One-chan,” Akane said in a meek voice. “Please come with me, Ranma-chan.”

The red head meekly followed Akane out onto the engawa and into the yard. Once they were out of sight, Kasumi turned to the panda.

“You, panda-san, get out of my house,” Kasumi said as an order. “Stay in the garden like a good panda.”

The panda was clearly upset by these developments, but it complied with Kasumi's commands. It waddled out into the yard and began sniffing around in it.

“What on earth is this?” Nabiki asked. “None of it makes sense.”

“You're right, Nabiki,” Kasumi's face had turned grim and her voice was cold. “It doesn't make any sense, but a young woman's life is at stake here and I fully intend to get to the bottom of this mystery.”

Nabiki gave her elder sister a hard stare.

“You sure we shouldn't call the police?”

“No, but for now I think it best that we try to sort this out on our own,” Kasumi said. “What do you propose I say to the police when I call them? That I am disappointed that my fiance is actually a fiancee?”

“Point well taken, Sis,” Nabiki said. “Why don't you go get the bandages and I'll go through their pack to find her some fresh clothing -- assuming there is any.”

“You should get out of that yukata first,” Kasumi said looking down at her pleated dress. “I'll run upstairs and change as well.”

 

* * *

 

Akane led Ranma through the breezeway around to the end of the house where Soun had established a sort of ablution pad for himself. The place was closed in by medicinal shrubs so that it would be hard for anyone to see who was bathing there from one of the walls.

“Oh, good, there's still a bar of soap in the dish,” Akane said. “I'll run and get you some wash rags -- and a lufa.”

“O...okay,” Ranma said. “Thanks.”

“Not a problem,” Akane said over her shoulder.

Ranma found the tap water to be refreshingly cool.

 _Oh, what a relief!_ Ranma thought as he turned the water and let the hose gush water all over his female body. _The heat is killing me as much as the places where Shit-daddy clawed me. Not to mention the damage my skull_ _took from that damned sig_ _n._ _How am I going to explain the curse to these nice people?_

The water felt so good that Ranma forgot the worries of his near future. He sat down on the small concrete pad to revel in the cool wet present. He was still sitting there using the hose to run water through his matted hair when Akane returned with a pair of wash rags.

“Use this one for your face,” Akane said, “and the other one for your underarms and body. Why haven't you shaved your pits?”

“Shaved my what?” Ranma asked.

“Your armpits,” Akane said in a scandalized voice. “They have long hair growing out of them.”

Ranma felt under his arm as his face turned sheepish.

“Oh, well, you see, I'm not actually a girl...”

“Oh, really?” Akane asked in the most skeptical voice Ranma had ever heard. “Your body says otherwise. What are you if you aren't a girl?”

“Well, I'm a girl right now because I'm in my cursed form,” Ranma said in a grating high pitched voice, “but its just a curse.”

“Just a curse?” Akane said. “Looks pretty serious to me. I think you need help that we're not equipped to provide.”

This annoyed Ranma beyond his ability to endure. He almost adopted a sullen silence, but then decided to clear the air temporarily.

“Okay, forget it,” Ranma said in a sharp voice. “Let's just concentrate on cleanin' these cuts and scrapes, why don't we?”

“And shaving your underarms,” Akane said in a firm voice.

“Okay, okay! I'll shave 'em if that's watcha want.”

“Good,” Akane said. “I'll go get a safety razor.”

“A what kind of...” Ranma started to ask, then let his voice fade into silence because he realized that Akane had already left.

He soaped up with the bar of soap that Soun had left in the dish mounted to the wall of the house, and began to scrub the road grime off of the skin of his female form. Some of that was painful and some of it was well out of his reach on his back, but then Kasumi and Nabiki arrived. Both of them wearing demure one piece bathing suits, with every intention of scrubbing Ranma down as well as the job could be done.

 _Hmph, I otta sic these girls on Shit-daddy,_ Ranma thought while Kasumi scrubbed his back and Nabiki gently washed the road rash on his right breast. _He could use a bath like this, although I would recommend that they use carpet cleaner on him. Or, just drape him over a fence and beat the dust out of 'im._

When Kasumi started to let down Ranma's hair, he interrupted her.

“Gimme that hair tie,” Ranma said. “I don't wanna lose it. There'll be serious consequences if I do.”

Kasumi face looked puzzled, but she handed Ranma the string with the odd slippery feel to it without comment. Ranma was grateful for Kasumi's acquiescence. He also greatly appreciated her help with his thick hair. He had not washed for over a month. His queue practically stood out like a stick from the back of his head.

“My goodness, Ranma,” Nabiki exclaimed. “It's surprising that you don't have scabies or even fleas.”

“I had fleas for a while,” Ranma said. “Was too busy dodgin' the Chinese cops to get properly clean. Had ta steal some hog dip to get rid of 'em.”

“They have things such as that in China?” Kasumi asked.

“Yeah, but they're rare and hard to find. That's why I had to live with the fleas for so long.”

“Didn't the dip break you out?” Nabiki asked.

“Sure did, but havin' a rash was better than havin' the fleas gnawin' on me constantly.”

Kasumi grunted.

“I must agree with you,” Kasumi said. “I'd have preferred a rash that lasted a week to the incessant torment of fleas as well.”

“Oh, yuck!” Nabiki said. “You've got head lice.”

“Comes from livin' on the road, ya know,” Ranma said. “Couldn't help it.”

Akane returned with a safety razor just as this revelation happened and Kasumi gave in to her frustration and let out an exasperated sigh.

“Akane, I have some pyrethrum tea in a bottle under the kitchen sink. Fetch it and that fine toothed comb in the furoba.”

Akane disappeared without a word.

“Oh, and bring one of the stools with you,” Kasumi shouted. “We have at least an hour's work here.”

Kasumi's estimate came up short by at least thirty minutes, but after it was over with, Ranma felt better than he had felt in ten years. He was clean. His road rash and scratches had been cleaned and dosed with iodine and then bandaged. The Tendo girls insisted that he rub his armpits with a lump of crystallized alum, which he did under protest.

He was especially grateful that most of the head lice were gone and that Kasumi had taken the time and care to comb their eggs out of his thick hair. She even went to the trouble of braiding his queue and tying it off with the funny slippery feeling string Ranma had insisted on keeping. But then the girls confronted him with the clothing they wanted him to wear.

“No, I'm not wearin' a dress!” Ranma shouted. “I'm a guy! Don't wanna look like some crossdressin' queer.”

Kasumi put both hands on her hips and stared hard at Onna-Ranma.

“That's exactly what you'll look like if you put on male clothing, Ranma-chan,” she said.

Nabiki and Akane started giggling, but then they laughed.

Onna-Ranma's frustration showed through with the pitch of his head and the gyrations of his female body. He even stamped the concrete pad with his feet.

“Just go get some hot water and I'll prove it to ya!” He shouted.

“Let's just get _her_ into the furo,” Nabiki said.

“Good idea, Nabiki,” Akane said. Kasumi nodded her head with a satisfied look as she handed Ranma a large towel.

“By all means, let us _all_ go to the furoba,” Kasumi said, “then we can all bear witness. Does that work for you, Ranma-chan?”

“Machigaina!” Ranma shouted _(Machigaina technically means “no mistake” but it can also be used in a large number of situations)._

So, the four ladies, make that three real ladies and one very deceptive one, trooped back up onto the engawa and into the chanoma of Tendo-ke. Soun chose that time to regain consciousness and sat up. He took one look at Ranma wearing the beach towel, gasped and then passed out again right where he was lying before. Ranma paused and stared daggers at the prostrate Tendo patriarch, then followed the girls into the furoba.

Ranma promptly stripped off the towel as he stepped right into the furo. The water was not quite hot enough to cancel his curse by heating his lower legs, so he scooped up some of it a dipper and poured over his head while standing in the water that was knee deep on his female form. The change took place slowly, simply because the water was at a borderline temperature, but it revoke his curse.

“EEEEK!” The Tendo sisters chorused.

“That can't be real!” Akane said with a gasp.'

“Oh, my!” Kasumi said.

“Grrr!” Nabiki growled and then wriggled. “Nice package there, Saotome-san.”

“You're not supposed notice that sort of thing, you know,” Ranma said in a hoarse voice, then promptly sat down in the furo. He made a rather large splash and the semi-hot water slopped over its tiled sides.

 _Shit, I hope they didn't see me gittin' a stiffie,_ Ranma thought. _I'll never hear the end of it if they did._

“Ladies,” Kasumi said. Her face was growing red from the base of her neck and rising in a line to the start of her hair. “I think -- ahem -- we should retire to the chanoma and let Ranma-kun relax alone for a while.”

The two younger girl's faces had gone quite pink. They tittered as they nodded their heads in agreement with their eldest sister and followed her rapid retreat.

 

* * *

 

Back in the chanoma, the three girls settled down around the dining table and started pouring each other tea.

“Well, at least now we know that Ranma has at least one great gift,” Nabiki said, her eyes were shiny from the excitement she had experienced in the furo.

“Yeah, that was scary,” Akane said.

All Kasumi could do was to limit her shudders to a lady like level.

“So, what's our next move, Kasumi?” Nabiki asked.

Kasumi studied the ceiling for a few seconds before looking Nabiki in the face.

“I fairly sure he's tired and in dire need of a nap,” she said. “Perhaps we should fix him something to eat. Oh, my! What do pandas eat?”

“Bamboo,” Akane said, “but what if Panda-san out there is cursed like Ranma?”

“Well, we can find that out in short order,” Nabiki said as she rose from the table and walked into the kitchen. She emerged from the kitchen carrying the three shou (~1.5 US gallon) brass kettle. It was nearly full of boiling water. Nabiki hopped off of the engawa and into the yard.

“Oh, Panda-san,” Nabiki called out. “I have hot water here for you. Wouldn't you like some?”

The panda promptly waddled as quickly as it could to Nabiki who then poured water on its head.

“Yeeow!” The chunky man man screamed. “It needn't be that hot, you know.”

“Sorry, but this is new to me,” Nabiki said. “It's new to all of us, I think, including you and Ranma. Is he your son?”

“Yes,” the big man gasped as he straightened out his clothing. “He is. My name is Saotome Genma, by the way. I hope you'll forgive us for introducing ourselves in such a disorderly fashion.”

“You are forgiven, Saotome-san,” Kasumi said. She was carrying the heavy pack Ranma had been carrying and handed it to Genma with one hand. “I assume your clean clothing is in this?”

“As clean as I have, yes,” Genma said.

Kasumi pointed toward the end of the house and said, “You will find everything you need to bath at the end of the house, Saotome-san. Feel free to avail yourself. If you need anything, just shout.”

“How 'bout a t...”

Akane walked out to them with two towels and two wash rags.

“You haven't got fleas or lice have you?” Akane asked.

“I'm bald in case you didn't notice little girl,” Genma said, spitting the words out at Akane. “So no, I don't have any head lice.”

“What about fleas?” Nabiki asked with an impish look on her face.

Genma merely growled an unintelligible answer to that question as he turned and shambled toward the breezeway.

“There's a bottle of pyrethrum tea on the pad back there if you need it, Saotome-san," Kasumi called after the departing Genma.

“Thank you, Tendo-san,” Genma said in a voice laden with sadness.

The three Tendo girls glanced at one another and had a good giggle.

“We had best go fix something for supper, ladies,” Kasumi said. “We won't have much time.”


End file.
